Case managment vs. BPM?

[wilsonch0]

If someone were to ask me, I would say that case management is a specialized subset or variant of BPM. But I am encountering people and books that talk about case management without reference to BPM; and BPM intro books that don't mention case management anywhere. I see major vendors that have separate products for case management and for BPM. And I didn't find any thing in this forum when I searched for "case management."

Do JBoss/RedHat see BPM and case management as separate domains, to be addressed by separate tools? Or would JBoss/RedHat say that case management is within the BPM domain so the BPM tools are the best way to implement it?

Clark Wilson

[wilsonch0]

I don't have a great answer yet, but yesterday a visiting JBoss techie said (my retrospective summary) that BPM processes typically follow a standard set of steps that are pretty well known ahead of time, but case management processes have more options and more variation, and hence the pathways are more complex and are less well determined ahead of time.