Information about Workflow

A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are always designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

Workflows are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Workflows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among these concepts are described later in this entry.

The term is used in computer programming to capture and develop human to machine interaction. Software such as K2 and Microsoft's Windows Workflow Foundation aim to provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processing of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without the need to understand computers or programming.

Related concepts

The concept of workflow is closely related to several other terms in operations research and other fields that study the nature of work, either quantitatively or qualitatively, such as artificial intelligence (in particular the sub-discipline of AI Planning) and ethnography. The term workflow is more commonly used in particular industries, such as printing, and professional domains, where it may have particular specialized meanings.

1. Processes: A process is a more specific notion than workflow, and can apply to physical or biological processes, for instance. In the context of concepts surrounding work, a process may be distinguished from a workflow by the fact that it has well-defined inputs, outputs and purposes, while the notion of workflow may apply more generally to any systematic pattern of activity (such as all processes occurring in a machine shop).
2. Planning and Scheduling: A plan is a description of the logically necessary, partially-ordered set of activities required to accomplish a specific goal given certain starting conditions. A plan, when augmented with a schedule and resource allocation calculations, completely defines a particular instance of systematic processing in pursuit of a goal. A workflow may be viewed as an (often optimal or near-optimal) realization of the mechanisms required to repeatedly execute the same (or similar) plans.

Historical development

See also:

Workflows are a distinctly modern phenomenon. While one might imagine individual efforts in rational organization of labor in the construction of historical artifacts such as the pyramids, the idea that one can create value by studying the nature of work itself and organizing it better is a distinctly modern one that should probably be attributed to Adam Smith. It is easiest to understand the development of the notions of workflow in terms of loosely defined eras, with a great deal of overlap.

Beginnings in Manufacturing

Notions of workflow are best understood in terms of the historical development of the conceptualization of work itself. The modern history of workflows can be traced to F. W. Taylor (Taylor, 1919) and H. Gantt. Together they launched the study of the deliberate, rational organization of work, in the context of manufacturing. The types of workflow of concern to Taylor and his contemporaries primarily involved mass and energy flows, and these were studied and improved using time and motion studies. Information-based workflows, however, did begin to grow in the same era. A particularly influential figure was Melvil Dewey who, besides inventing the eponymous Dewey Decimal System, was also responsible for the development of the hanging file folder. While the assembly line remains the most famous example of a workflow from this era, the early thinking around work was far more sophisticated than is commonly understood, and the notion of flow was more than a sequential breakdown of processing. The common conceptual models of modern operations research, including flow shops, job shops and queuing systems (Pinedo, 2001) can be found in evolved forms in early 20th century industry. That said, this early era was still limited by its relatively inflexible notions of information flow and thus is identified with the simplest notions of workflow optimization and productivity: throughput and resource utilization. The cultural impact of this era of workflows can be understood through films such as Chaplin's classic Modern Times. These concepts did not stay confined to the shop floor (one magazine invited housewives to puzzle over the fastest way to toast three slices of bread on a one-side, two-slice grill). The popular book Cheaper by the dozen introduced the emerging concepts to the context of family life.

Maturation and Growth

The invention of the typewriter and the copier allowed the principles of rational organization of labor, first discovered in the manufacturing shop floor. Paper, filing systems and sophisticated systems of managing physically manifest information flows evolved. Alongside this increasing scope of formalized workflows to information work, two other events provided a huge impetus for the development of thought around workflows. These were the development of mathematical optimization techniques and the maturation of the field of optimization and the impact of World War II and the Apollo program, both unprecedented in their demands for the rational organization of work. In cultural terms, the classic management tome, The Organization Man documented the nature of work in this era.

The Quality Era

By 1980 two glaring flaws in the nature of the supposedly scientific organization of workflows became apparent. The first was that the methods pioneered by Taylor only applied to humans conceptualized as one-dimensional automatons. Considered in the light of human needs for self-actualization, creative engagement in work and growth (the Maslow hierarchy became a popular tool in this critique), the classical industrial-style organization of work was critiqued as being both dehumanizing and suboptimal in its use of the potential of human beings. The second critique had to do with quality. Workflows conceptualized to be rational with respect at a given time, even with the best of intentions, were understood to acquire inertia and rigidity, rendering them irrational with respect to changing work conditions. The first critique did not gain much traction other than acknowledgement as an issue, but quality, in both analytic and synthetic manifestations, transformed the nature of work through a variety of movements ranging from total quality management to six sigma to more qualitative notions of business process re-engineering (Hammers and Champy, 1991). Under the influence of the quality movement, workflows became the subject of much scrutiny and optimization efforts. Acknowledgement of the dynamic and changing nature of the demands on workflows came in the form of recognition of the phenomena associated with critical paths and moving bottlenecks (Goldratt, E., 1996).

The Information Era

The experiences with the quality movement made it clear that information flows are fundamentally different from the mass and energy flows which inspired the first forms of rational workflows. The low cost and adaptability of information flows were seen as enabling workflows that were at once highly rational in their organization and highly flexible, adaptable and responsive. These insights unleashed a whole range of information technology at workflows in manufacturing, services and pure information work. Flexible manufacturing systems, just in time inventory management and other highly agile and adaptable systems of workflow are products of this era.

The Virtual Workflow Era

The Internet bust of the early years of the 21st century led to a period of caution towards ambitious conceptualizations of smart workflows. Today, a variety of actors in the economy are returning to a consideration of the problem of developing models of work that are at once rational, flexible and capable of taking advantage of globalization, distributed work practices, while allowing the humans embedded in them to realize their full creative potential. Among the most exciting developments are the serious thought given to apparently anarchic systems of organization that have evolved in the open source software community.

Examples

The following examples illustrate the variety of workflows seen in various contexts:

1. In military planning, a Concept of Operations (CONOPS) is a workflow that defines particular mission types
2. In machine shops, particularly job shops and flow shops, the flow of a part through the various processing stations is a work flow
3. Insurance claims processing is an example of an information-intensive, document-driven workflow
4. Wikipedia editing is an example of a stochastic workflow
5. The Getting Things Done (GTD) system is a model of personal workflow management for information workers

Features and phenomenology

1. Modeling: Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets.
2. Measurement: Many of the concepts used to measure scheduling systems in operations research are useful for measuring general workflows. These include throughput, processing time, and other regular metrics.
3. Specialized connotations: The term workflow has specialized connotations in information technology, document management and imaging. Since 1993, one trade consortium specifically focused on workflow management and the interoperability of workflow management systems has been the Workflow Management Coalition.
4. Scientific workflows: found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, where they successfully met the need for multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research organizations, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.
5. Human-Machine Interaction: In recent years, several conceptualizations of mixed-initiative workflows have been studied, particularly in the military, where automated agents play roles just as humans do. For innovative, adaptive, collaborative human work the techniques of Human Interaction Management are required.

Workflow improvement theories

The key driver to gain benefit from the understanding of the workflow process in a business context is that the throughput of the workstream path is modelled in such a way as to evaluate the efficiency of the flow route through internal silos with a view to increasing discrete control of uniquely identified business attributes and rules and reducing potential low efficiency drivers. Evaluation of resources, both physical and human is essential to evaluate hand-off points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks. Several workflow improvement theories have been proposed and implemented in the modern workplace. These include:

1. Six Sigma
2. Total Quality Management
3. Business process reengineering
4. Lean systems

As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast different workflow engines across both of these domains.

Workflow components

A workflow can usually be described using formal or informal flow diagramming techniques, showing directed flows between processing steps. Single processing steps or components of a workflow can basically be defined by three parameters:

1. input description: the information, material and energy required to complete the step
2. transformation rules, algorithms, which may be carried out by associated human roles or machines, or a combination
3. output description: the information, material and energy produced by the step and provided as input to downstream steps.

Components can only be plugged together if the output of one previous (set of) component(s) is equal to the mandatory input requirements of the following component. Thus, the essential description of a component actually comprises only in- and output that are described fully in terms of data types and their meaning (semantics). The algorithms' or rules' description need only be included when there are several alternative ways to transform one type of input into one type of output - possibly with different accuracy, speed, etc..

Especially when the components are non-local services that are invoked remotely via a computer network, like Web services, additional descriptors like QoS, availability, etc. have to be considered, too.

Workflow applications

Main article: Workflow application

Many software systems to support workflows in particular domains exist. Such systems manage tasks such as automatic routing, partially automated processing and integration between different functional software applications and hardware systems that contribute to the value-addition process underlying the workflow.

See also

• Business process management, Business process modeling
• Business-driven development
• Computer-supported collaboration
• Enterprise content management
• Human interaction management
• Process architecture
• Smart contracts
• Workflow management coalition

References

• Layna Fischer (ed.): 2007 BPM and Workflow Handbook, Future Strategies Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0-9777527-1-3
• Layna Fischer: Workflow Handbook 2005, Future Strategies, ISBN 0-9703509-8-8
• Layna Fischer: Excellence in Practice, Volume V: Innovation and Excellence in Workflow and Business Process Management, ISBN 0-9703509-5-3
• Keith Harrison-Broninski. Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management. ISBN 0-929652-44-4
• Holly Yu: Content and Work Flow Management for Library Websites: Case Studies, Information Science Publishing, ISBN 1-59140-534-3
• Wil van der Aalst, Kees van Hee: Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems, B&T, ISBN 0-262-72046-9
• Marlon Dumas, Wil van der Aalst, Arthur ter Hofstede: Process-Aware Information Systems, Wiley, ISBN 0-471-66306-9
• Setrag Khoshafian, Marek Buckiewicz: Introduction to Groupware, Workflow and Workgroup Computing, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-02946-7
• Rashid N. Kahn: Understanding Workflow Automation: A Guide to Enhancing Customer Loyalty, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-061918-3
• Dan C. Marinescu: Internet-Based Workflow Management: Towards a Semantic Web, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-43962-2
• Frank Leymann, Dieter Roller: Production Workflow: Concepts and Techniques, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-021753-0
• Michael Jackson, Graham Twaddle: Business Process Implementation: Building Workflow Systems, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-17768-4
• Alec Sharp, Patrick McDermott: Workflow Modeling, Artech House Publishers, ISBN 1-58053-021-4
• Toni Hupp: Designing Work Groups, Jobs, and Work Flow, Pfeiffer & Company, ISBN 0-7879-0063-X
• Gary Poyssick, Steve Hannaford: Workflow Reengineering, Adobe, ISBN 1-56830-265-7
• Dave Chaffey: Groupware, Workflow and Intranets: Reengineering the Enterprise with Collaborative Software, Digital Press, ISBN 1-55558-184-6
• Wolfgang Gruber: Modeling and Transformation of Workflows With Temporal Constraints, IOS Press, ISBN 1-58603-416-2
• Andrzej Cichocki, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Darrell Woelk: Workflow and Process Automation Concepts and Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 0-7923-8099-1
• Alan R. Simon, William Marion: Workgroup Computing: Workflow, Groupware, and Messaging, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-057628-9
• Penny Ann Dolin: Exploring Digital Workflow, Delmar Thomson Learning, ISBN 1-4018-9654-5
• Gary Poyssick: Managing Digital Workflow, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-010911-8
• Frank J. Romano: PDF Printing & Workflow, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-020837-X
• James G. Kobielus: Workflow Strategies, Hungry Minds, ISBN 0-7645-3012-7
• Alan Rickayzen, Jocelyn Dart, Carsten Brennecke: Practical Workflow for SAP, Galileo, ISBN 1-59229-006-X
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Angela Ashenden: E-process: Workflow for the E-business, Ovum, ISBN 1-902566-65-3
• Stanislaw Wrycza: Systems Development Methods for Databases, Enterprise Modeling, and Workflow Management, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, ISBN 0-306-46299-0
• Database Support for Workflow Management, Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 0-7923-8414-8
• Clarence A. Ellis: Workflow technology, Computer Supported Co-operative Work, M. Beaudouin-Lafon (ed.), John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 1999, pp. 29-54
• Matthew Searle: Developing With Oracle Workflow

External links

• Workflow patterns
• "Knowledge Based Techniques to Increase the Flexibility of Workflow Management" by Barbara Dellen, Frank Maurer, Gerhard Pews
• The State of Workflow May 2004 article by Tom Baeyens
• Business Process Modelling vs. Workflow Management
• Workflow Management Coalition