Internet-mediated workflow will be the single most
important technology of the early 21st century. To see this, consider
your current onslaught of e-mail. People call this "information
overload." Some claim that the remedy is to mine it using web-bots
that can find relevant data because the problem is finding the right
information. Rather, the problem is just the reverse.
We are already deluged with the relevant
information. That's why we feel burdened. Otherwise, we could just hit
the delete key on everything. Junk mail is annoying but easily
disposed of. It is not so easy to deal with the message from a
colleague asking you to review a paper or to handle a client. And
those are just the big chunks: the major requests. What really kill us
are all the thousand small cuts out of our time and energy each
day.
Yes, but what does this
have to do with workflow? Isn't workflow just some sort of planned
document routing?
That was last
decade. Following actual practices, planned or unplanned, and
converting them into formal processes is now commonly described as
"paving the cowpaths." New workflow systems can handle processes that
are very flexible, often evolving in directions not
anticipated. Workflow is increasingly becoming a way of helping people
organize their work, rather than coercing them.
ORGANIZING
WORK
Those of us whose work life is governed by e-mail
are called "information workers," but the economists cannot account
for us. We produce no goods and yet companies assign the value of our
salaries to us for talking and writing. What are we doing that is of
value? We are synthesizing, restructuring information. It is our
information restructuring that is of value.
A major part of our information
structuring is to take the bits and pieces of e-mail and use them in
organizing our work, which frequently means sending off e-mails to
other folks for information or delegation of tasks and subtasks. If
this sounds familiar to you, then you see where this is headed. A
great deal of our "mind burden" goes into organizing work. You can
only do so much, and right now, you are near the limit.
Now flash to companies and
business-to-business (so-called "B2B") commerce. Companies have to
organize their work, too. And they too are limited in what they can
manage, even internally. External relations with customers and
suppliers complicate matters further and make it even more difficult
to manage. Our inability to manage work across interorganizational
boundaries limits the complexity of the work we can manage and makes
that work slower and more costly than it need be.
This applies to you at your terminal
because you are now getting requests and information at an ever
increasing rate from people all over. It applies to companies as they
struggle to compete in commerce dominated by those who can respond
agilely not only to the marketplace but also to changes in the
electronic supply chain. The necessity to seize opportunities - missing no
chances - is
just as important as that of ensuring quality. Companies increasingly
outsource functions as readily as they buy supplies. What they need is
the ability to take advantage of the "sea of services," which means
organizing external services for local use.
SHARED WORK
LAYER
We have nearly ubiquitous digital communications
today. The Web provides a common platform for document sharing, above
the seventh layer ( http://www.rad.com/networks/1994/osi/layers.htm
). What's missing is the next Internet layer for work
sharing. That is the target of the four articles in this special
issue.
Hayes et al. cover the
current effort by existing workflow vendors to establish a common
Internet-based framework for their systems. Bolcer proposes a new
Internet protocol for supporting distributed workflow. Kim describes a
new Internet-based workflow system, perhaps typical of a new
generation. And Maurer describes how a workflow system can be
integrated with project management for even greater control of
work. Of course, these articles are but a small sample of efforts in
this area. Moreover, they represent just the beginning.
One day, your e-mail will include
XML-based process descriptions that enable your personal workflow
client to graph just how overcommitted you are over the next three
months. And the same descriptions will allow other engines to
dynamically optimize supply chains as well as replan and reschedule
large projects, such as the international space station, that are
barely possible today.
We can no
more foresee what this new workflow technology will bring about than
the early users of accounting computers could have foreseen today's
Web-based information systems.
Charles
Petrie is executive director of the Stanford Networking Research
Center. His research interest is distributed process coordination,
with emphasis on concurrent design, planning, and scheduling. He also
works on the use of XML for open, interoperable workflow. Petrie has a
BS in mathematics from Louisiana State University, and an MS and a PhD
in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the
editor-in-chief emeritus of IEEE Internet
Computing.
Sunil
Sarin is a principal architect with TIBCO Software Inc. He
received an undergraduate degree in engineering from the Indian
Institute of Technology, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served as chair
of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) Interoperability Working
Group, and received an AIIM International Standards Excellence Award
in 1999.Article Summaries
WORKFLOW INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDS FOR THE
INTERNET
James G. Hayes, Effat Peyrovian, Sunil
Sarin, Marc-Thomas Schmidt, Keith D. Swenson, and Rainer
Weber
Companies such as FedEx and Dell have shown the value of
providing process information in user-readable form over the Web. In
1994, the Workflow Management Coalition laid the foundation for
providing it in machine-readable form. The Workflow Reference Model
established a basis for developing standards of interoperability that
could support Internet-scale workflow across companies.
MAGI: AN
ARCHITECTURE FOR MOBILE AND DISCONNECTED
WORKFLOW
Gregory Alan Bolcer
Automated workflow
systems do not yet adequately address information mobility or tasks
disconnected from the rest of a business process. While the current
Web infrastructure lends itself to disseminating information, it also
inhibits process definition decentralization and execution through
workflow systems. The Micro-Apache Generic Interface is an
architecture that can overcome some of these limitations.
WW-FLOW: WEB-BASED
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT WITH RUNTIME
ENCAPSULATION
Yeongho Kim, Suk-Ho Kang, Dongsoo Kim,
Joonsoo Bae, and Kyung-Joon Ju
Runtime encapsulation of nested
process models supports flexible workflow management in a distributed
heterogeneous environment. Through its modular design, the WW-flow
system provides a hierarchical control scheme over complex processes
and subprocesses. Implemented in Java, the workflow engine and client
interfaces are portable and platform-independent.
MERGING PROJECT PLANNING AND
WEB-ENABLED DYNAMIC WORKFLOW TECHNOLOGIES
Frank
Maurer, Barbara Dellen, Fawsy Bendeck, Sigrid Goldmann, Harald Holz,
Boris Kötting, and Martin Schaaf
The MILOS system supports
dynamic coordination of distributed software development teams by
integrating project planning and workflow technologies over the
Internet. The three-tiered Java architecture enables plan refinements
to be made on the fly, and a change management component automatically
creates traceability relationships between project entities.
![[PDF ICON]](pdficon.gif)
