Let’s start with a quote of General D. D. Eisenhower: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. This quote highlights an important need, not always well clarified in the typical dynamic environment of a knowledge worker: how important is designing a full process beforehand when we don’t know if it is going to succeed or not, or the context is going to change unexpectedly, or any other contingency. It is very likely that dealing with the need to anticipate the future (foresee) depends on the problem at hand and it may have different approaches among a spectrum of possible choices.

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This post continues a previous one (http://blog.iactiveit.com/?p=224) and focuses on the dynamic composition of goal-oriented context-dependent processes, one of the most obscure capabilities of ACM from a technological support point of view. In particular, this post explains how Artificial Intelligence Planning & Scheduling (AIP&S) may give advice on how to compose a process on the fly to achieve a certain goal.

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We live days of broad discussion about what Adaptive Case Management is or isn’t and, although ACM seems to be more than dynamic goal-oriented process generation, we must recognize that this capability is a central issue for knowledge workers. At the end of the day, knowledge workers will have to get things done and, in order to do them, they will have to set up, probably, ad-hoc or customized processes to achieve their goals in a changing context and they will have to find and arrange the required resources to execute these processes. Read the rest of this entry »