Care and enterprise systems: an archeology of case management

This paper is a contribution in investigating how Enterprise Systems (ES) are evolving in supporting "cases of work," and if this evolution can be seen as an incremental development of current workflow management platforms. To this aim, we present an historical account of the emergence of the concept of case in service providing enterprises by taking the case of healthcare and hospital work as paradigmatic. In so doing, we stress the subtle relationship between cases and the documental artifacts that reify them, and between case management and continuous activities of ad-hoc interpretation and situated negotiation that can occur between actors even outside rigid protocolized and role-based interactions. This paper is then a first contribution toward the critical appraisal of case management technologies that give due visibility to unanticipated interdependencies and the opportunity to consider them as complementary components of ESs with respect to standard solutions based on workflow management middlewares. © Springer-Verlag 2011