A business-process discipline for handling unstructured, knowledge-intensive work items — ‘cases’ — whose resolution path cannot be fully predetermined, such as compliance investigations, insurance claims, legal matters, and customer disputes. Each case aggregates documents, tasks, participants, deadlines, and an audit trail around a single subject, and progresses through investigation, decision, and resolution stages guided by worker judgement rather than a rigid predefined flow.
Semantic Classification
Content
Definition
Case management is the practice of organising work around a case: a long-running, goal-oriented unit of work centred on a subject (a customer, claim, incident, or investigation) whose path to resolution depends on information that emerges as the work proceeds. Where classic Business Process Management models work as predictable, repeatable flows, case management addresses the complementary space of unstructured, knowledge-driven work — the sequence of activities is chosen by skilled workers within guardrails, not dictated in advance by a process diagram.
A case acts as a container. It binds together the subject’s data, accumulated documents and evidence, the tasks performed and outstanding, the people and roles involved, deadlines and service-level clocks, and a complete audit trail of decisions. Cases move through broad phases — intake and triage, investigation and assessment, decision, action, and closure — with the discipline supplying escalation rules, four-eyes approvals, and quality checks along the way. The Object Management Group’s Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standardises this “adaptive” style of process modelling as a counterpart to BPMN.
In financial crime operations, case management is the downstream half of Transaction Monitoring: alerts generated by monitoring rules or models are triaged into cases, investigated by analysts who assemble customer context and transaction history, and either dismissed as false positives or escalated to suspicious activity reports for regulators. The discipline is realised in software by the Case Management System, and its record-keeping obligations tie it closely to Records Management and Regulatory Compliance.
Current Landscape
- Adaptive case management (ACM): the modern strand emphasising worker empowerment, run-time plan changes, and data-driven case progression rather than design-time flowcharts.
- Standards: OMG CMMN 1.1 for modelling; sector-specific guidance (FATF recommendations, FCA/FinCEN expectations) shapes investigation and reporting workflows in financial services.
- Tooling: dedicated platforms (Pega, Appian, ServiceNow, NICE Actimize for AML) combine case containers with Workflow Automation, business rules, and analytics dashboards.
- AI augmentation: machine learning now assists alert triage, case prioritisation, evidence summarisation, and narrative drafting, while regulators require that final dispositions remain explainable and auditable.
- Metrics: case ageing, throughput, first-time resolution, backlog, and quality-assurance sampling are the standard operational measures of a case-management function.