EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT CASE MANAGEMENT – 5 GOVERNANCE MISTAKES TO AVOID

This is an excerpt from Armedia.com

Case Management is all about the process of taking a case (medical, law enforcement, complaint, FOIA and so on) from start to finish with as little blind spots as possible. But this work gets harder because the process usually is not rigidly structured. It’s dynamic, content-intensive and collaborative process that sometimes has feedback loops and myriads of dependencies.

An ineffective case management app can cause tons of frustration and unwanted costs. It can even pull an organization down to using pen and paper as the only way to get things done. Such poorly developed case management software can cause many incoherent steps, broken links and truncated communication that eventually brings the entire system down to a halt.

Here are just a few of the many case management pitfalls organizations deal with on daily basis. This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just a handful of common errors that organizations and team leaders face when staring at the Case Management Software issue.

MISTAKE NO.1: DEVELOPING CUSTOMIZED SOFTWARE WHEN THERE IS AN OFF-THE-SHELF SOLUTION

Back in 2000, the FBI wanted a software solution that will allow pieces of information gathered through different channels at different times to be connected, thereby allowing for more effective investigations through better flows of information.

This desire resulted in a $170 Million budget for the Virtual Case File software. The endeavor failed miserably in 2005, causing quite a bit of criticism. The loss was set at $104 million of the taxpayers’ money. The Bureau was stuck with an antiquated software that hampered down its effectiveness. The FBI took another 12 years to conceive, fund and build a more ambitious (and more expensive of course) Sentinel case management system that got launched in 2012.