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Definition

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

Problem Statements from members

  • Page:
    UW Madison Problem Statement (Itana) — UW-Madison: New Hire Workflow Problem Statement. The New Hire process crosses many systems including ERPS (HR and Financial) as well as local systems (Parking, Library, etc.) This process would benefit greatly from an enterprise workflow system. Complexity lies in the integration of the systems with the workflow system and with role definitions in the enterprise. The many departmental variations on the hiring process make the culture change a challenge.
  • Page:
    U of U Problem Statement (Itana) — University of Utah: At the University of Utah, workflow is a problem because:
    • There is not a clear owner of business processes, a process is not necessarily consistent across administrative boundaries (BPM issues)
    • There is not a useable electronic representation of organizational relationships (identity management issues)
    • There are many exceptions to who is authorized to approve actions (role assignment and management)
    • Some critical identifiers are not used consistently across administrative boundaries (data management and definition issues)
  • Page:
    Payroll cycle problem statement (Itana) — Each payroll cycle requires participation by many actors, including individual employees, their supervisors, campus/division financial offices, a central payroll office, and central IT.
  • Page:
    University of California, Irvine Problem Statement (Itana) — UCIrvine:  Delegated Access Control and Periodic Access Review Workflow Problem Statement.   As requested by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in an SAS112 audit, and for better compliance with PCI DSS,  UC Irvine needs to create a much tighter process to control access to financial business transactions, formalize periodic access review by data proprietors, and formalize enforcement by Internal Audit.  An enterprise workflow solution with clearly defined roles becomes critical for tracking who requested access, when and why; who approved this access; who last reviewed access and what problems were identified; and who revoked access, when, and why.   Any required training as well as background checks that are needed to qualify for a role also must be automated.   This effort is also required for streamlining manual and paper based yearly audit reports, that are currently collected from multiple systems. 

Sites of interest:

Workflow Standards and Modeling:

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
  • Have a Screen2Screen session to show the tools that various groups are using

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.

Issues:

  • What are the prerequisites for doing Enterprise Workflow?
    • Organizational model that is well defined so you can put people into the right roles
    • A robust middleware layer for messaging, orchestration, etc. (Phelps, UW-Madison)
    • Single a point of access to all of the workflows and communications - a portal
  • Do you have well defined owners for business processes?
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