Research Challenges in Adaptive Case Management: A Literature Review

Non-traditional scenarios for Business Process Management (BPM) are often knowledge-intensive and driven by user decisions making it difficult to specify them into a set of activities with precedence relations at design-time. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is gaining interest among researchers and practitioners as an emerging paradigm to master situations in which adaptions have to be made at run-time by so called knowledge workers. In contrast to workflow management the ACM paradigm is not dictating knowledge workers a predefined course of action, but provides them with the required information at the right time and authorizes them to make decisions on their own. Understanding current research challenges imposed by ACM is of utmost importance for the future evolution of this discipline as well as for the maturity of the BPM field. In this paper we present 77 codes referring to research challenges in ACM that have been revealed from an extensive literature review with scientific publications and books. We aggregated these codes to 13 concepts and categorized them into five distinct areas for data integration, theoretical foundation, authorization and role management, knowledge worker empowerment as well as knowledge storage and extraction. Main goal of this paper is to provide a thorough basis for the discussion of future research activities in the community which are indispensable for ACM.