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

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
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BPEL_engines - BPEL Engine Comparison
• http://www.productshare.org.uk/pp/publication/results.asp?categoryidproject=5747 - Workflow National Project of UK Local Government

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
• 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?