Intelligent Collaborative Care Management (ICCM): Achieving and managing contractual relationships and service delivery

Abstract

The Intelligent Collaborative Care Management (ICCM) project offers a comprehensive framework and architecture for understanding and helping to manage the complete life cycle of customer care. This framework formally captures the main components of providing a customer with a number of possibly interrelated services by various service providers. The customer has objectives expected to be fulfilled by these services and the service providers themselves may have objectives in delivering the services to the customer. These services are delivered over time and potentially the entire lifetime of the customer. The ICCM framework specifies two functionalities: a) basic functionalities to generate care plans, form contractual relationships and deliver services, including the specification of many complex interactions and constraints between service providers and customers, and b) extended functionalities to support adherence of contract formation and service delivery and variations of contractual commitments. We present first empirical results into the performance of a prototype system based on the ICCM framework. A key insight is that mental models of human agents (i.e., service providers and customers) are required to efficiently intervene when contractual commitment and service delivery processes go "off-track" and when the contract requires renewal and variation. Further, we offer guidelines to optimise the benefit/cost trade-offs of applying interventions in achieving and managing relationships and delivery. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.