Workflow Management

Dpd, 1995

Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.

Distributed and parallel …, 1995

Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.

2014

Lectures on Concurrency and Petri Nets, 2004

Over the last decade there has been a shift from "data-aware" information systems to "process-aware" information systems. To support business processes an enterprise information system needs to be aware of these processes and their organizational context. Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of such operational business processes. BPM can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. This tutorial introduces models, systems, and standards for the design, analysis, and enactment of workflow processes. Petri nets are used for the modeling and analysis of workflows. Using Petri nets as a formal basis, contemporary systems, languages, and standards for BPM and WFM are discussed. Although it is clear that Petri nets can serve as a solid foundation for BPM/WFM technology, in reality systems, languages, and standards are developed in an ad-hoc fashion. To illustrate this XPDL, the "Lingua Franca" proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), is analyzed using a set of 20 basic workflow patterns. This analysis exposes some of the typical semantic problems restricting the application of BPM/WFM technology.

2001

This paper introduces definition and enactment models to characterize workflows. The proposed knowledge model provides concepts for modeling activities, data used by such activities, agents, and ordering operators and synchronization modes used for specifying activities dependencies. The behavior model provides dimensions that characterize workflow enactment. Both models are currently implemented in our workflow management system called AFLOWS.

1995

Recent recession has compelled many companies to find more effective ways to conduct their business. One remedy suggested is to model organizational dynamics as "business processes" and provide a suitable tool support for this. In this context the buzzwords business process re-engineering and workflow have been often quoted. The basic idea in this thinking is to view the functioning of an organization to consist of business processes and provide computer support for as large part of the processes as possible through "workflow systems". There are currently perhaps hundreds of products which claim to support workflows. We believe that workflow techniques are a proper way of supporting the process approach, but that the approach requires further development for several reasons. In this paper, we will discuss the development needs by presenting organizational and architectural considerations and requirements resulting from them for the workflow techniques. One centra...

Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '94, 1994

Workflow management is a technology that is con.siden?d strategically important by many businesses, and its market growth shows no signs of abating. It is, however, often viewed with skepticism by the research community, conjuring up visions of oppressed workers performing rigidly-defined tasks on an assembly line. Although the potential for abuse no doubt exists, workflow management can instead be used to help individuals manage their work and to provide a clear context for performing that work. A key challenge in the realization of this ideal is the reconciliation of workflow process models and software with the rich variety of activities and behaviors that comprise "real" work. Our experiences with the InConcert workflow management system are used as a basis for outlining several issues that will need to be addressed in meeting this challenge, This is intended as an invitation to CSCW researchers to influence this important technology in a constructive manner by drawing on research and experience.

2004

Workflows for e-Science

In this chapter, we take a step back from the individual applications and software systems and attempt to categorize the types of issues that we are facing today and the challenges we see ahead. This is by no means a complete picture of the challenges but rather a set of observations about the various aspects of workflow management. In a broad sense, we are organizing our thoughts in terms of the different workflow systems discussed in this book, from the user interface down to the execution environment.

Workflow management systems, a relatively recent technology , are designed to make work more efficient, integrate heterogeneous application systems, and support interorganizational processes in electronic commerce applications. In this paper, we introduce the field of workflow automation, the subject of this special issue of Information Systems Frontiers. In the first part of the paper, we provide basic definitions and frameworks to aid understanding of workflow management technologies. In the remainder of the paper, we discuss technical and management research opportunities in this field and discuss the other contributions to the special issue.