Abstract
As businesses feel competitive and economic pressures to automate and streamline their operations, they examine their day-to-day business processes and look to business process reengineering pratices to provide solutions. Improved networking capabilities and the widescale adoption of open systems architectures have allowed businesses to tie their information systems together and share data across departments. The challenge now involves coordinating and automating the flow of work between people and groups in an organization. This has prompted the emergence of a new kind of infrastructure, workflow enabler, which provides a model for business processes, and a foundation on which to build solutions supporting the execution and management of business processes. This article examines the technology trends, business benefits, and requirements which have lead to this development. It describes the logical structure and an operational model of an open workflow system, and positions ObjectFlow, a software product, within this framework to illustrate the concepts.
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Recommended by: Ahmed Elmagarmid
NeXT Computer, Inc.
This work was done while the authors were employed at Digital Equipment Corporation. The contents of this article reflect the view of the authors only. It does not necessarily represent the product direction of Digital Equipment Corporation, Electronic Data Systems, or NeXT Computer Inc., nor does it imply that the current release of ObjectFlow or the current version of the Distributed Workflow Architecture from Digital Equipment Corporation conform to the description in this paper.
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Hsu, M., Kleissner, C. ObjectFlow: Towards a process management infrastructure. Distrib Parallel Databases 4, 169–194 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00204906
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00204906