Enterprise Workflow

Sites of interest:

• https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/workflow/Enterprise+Workflow+Investigation
• http://www.wfmc.org - Workflow Management Coalition
• http://workflowpatterns.com/ - Product analysis & pattern analysis

Workflow Standards and Modeling:

• OASIS Tech Comm. Bpel4people charter: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/bpel4people/charter.php
• Bpel4people and WS-HumanTask get Reference Implementation story
• Mapping Business Processes to Workflows from ECOMOD

Tasks:

• Provide overviews of workflow systems included with products like the Sun access management system.
• Develop applicable definitions (what do we mean by workflow?)
• Define use cases to illustrate the range of problems that we're trying to solve.
• Develop case studies
• Compile a survey of tools
• Adapt information from well-known workflow sites to higher education the workflow management coalition site is www.wfmc.org
• Gather example workflows
• Develop a single workflow (Hiring) and see how it has been implemented on various campuses

Workflow is based on Work Items in a Business Process that are acted on by People in Roles

Enterprise Workflow vs. Internal Workflow

• Internal Workflow is within a given application. Enterprise Workflow spans across multiple applications. Many business processes cross the boundaries of applications (e.g. Hiring may touch on Telephone, Network, HR, Parking, etc.)
• Various aspects or styles of Enterprise Workflow:
  • Document-centric workflow (routing for approval or signature) vs. messaging centric workflow (like in SOA-based workflow)
  • Automatically Trigging Events and changes in the systems vs. notifying a person to make changes in the system
  • Collector of Information that automatically gets updated in the systems vs. gathering data for a person to key into a system
  • Physical Workflows (moving things like goods and people) vs. digital workflows

Benefits:

• Transparency into the state of the workflow
• Ability to gather metrics of the process
• Audit-ability and Traceability
• Workflow as a way of knowing what your capabilities are.
  • If you don't know you business processes, you don't know what you are capable of delivering as a service.
  • There is a tight coupling of Business Processes, their triggers, and the services you offer.
• Allows you to parallelize process which might be serial processes now because of the paper workflow.
• Captures complex business processes so that the steps can be reproduced at a later date.