Sites of interest:
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
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.
