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Workflow is important. It’s a valuable technology. It is also a discipline e, practice, and concept. Like knowledge management, all types of vendors claim that their product or service is “workflow” because it’s so important. It has taken the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) some five years of constant collaboration and education to achieve a common appreciation of what workflow really is, and what it is not. In those five years, the technology and deployment practice have developed and matured substantially, such that we may have difficulty in recognizing five-year-old workflow products!
It is very important that workflow is correctly implemented, because the technology has a significant impact on the operations of an organization. For example, the 1998 Viewstar installation in the Revenue & Benefits Department of Lewisham ( London, England ) Borough Council impacted their operations in the first full year in the following ways:
$5 million additional revenues
Fraud Investigations save an additional $1.7 million through speedier processes and cross checking capability
$0.5 million savings on operational costs
This chapter describes the current understanding of “workflow” with the assumption that the reader has no prior knowledge of the topic. It is designed as a basic primer that will help with the appreciation of the more advanced topics described in later articles.
In 1996, the Workflow Management Coalition published a glossary of all useful terms related to workflow. The latest version is published in Section Two. It defines workflow as:
The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
In th early days, work was passed from one participant (or worker) to another. The main benefits were that work was delivered to people, and each worker could assume that work was ready for processing, because the workflow system would not forward incomplete items. Delivery was automated.
Now workflow technology has matured; it is the process itself that is automated. A work item or data set is created, and is processed and changed in stages at a number of processing points to meet business goals. Most workflow engines can now handle very complex series of processes. Any condition that can be expressed mathematically can be managed by a workflow system. There is a new branch of Calculus being created to assist the workflow industry to manage this increase in complexity.