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Workflow Management
Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. More specifically, workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is considered in Workflow, Workflow considers "throughput" as a distinct measure. Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets.
While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging software.
Distinction can be made between "scientific" and "business" workflow paradigms. While the former is mostly concerned with throughput of data through various algorithms, applications and services, the latter concentrates on scheduling task executions, including dependencies which are not necessarily data-driven and may include human agents.
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.
Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software application server and organizing a paper or electronic document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 1970s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure systems.
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 handoff points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks.
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.
In general, workflow techniques are appropriate only for work in which human involvement is limited to key data entry and decision points. For innovative, adaptive, collaborative human work the techniques of Human Interaction Management are required.
Workflow components
Single steps or components of a workflow can basically be defined by three parameters:
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 systems
Workflow diagram systems are defined as "systems that help organizations to specify, execute, monitor, and coordinate the flow of work cases within a distributed office environment".
The system contains two basic components:
A Workflow Application is where various applications, components and people must be involved in the processing of data to complete an instance of a process. For example, consider a purchase order that moves through various departments for authorization and eventual purchase. The orders may be treated as messages, which are put into various queues for processing. A workflow process involves constant change and update. You can introduce new components into the operation without changing any code.
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Workflow Management
Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. More specifically, workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is considered in Workflow, Workflow considers "throughput" as a distinct measure. Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets.
While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging software.
Distinction can be made between "scientific" and "business" workflow paradigms. While the former is mostly concerned with throughput of data through various algorithms, applications and services, the latter concentrates on scheduling task executions, including dependencies which are not necessarily data-driven and may include human agents.
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.
Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software application server and organizing a paper or electronic document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 1970s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure systems.
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 handoff points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks.
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.
In general, workflow techniques are appropriate only for work in which human involvement is limited to key data entry and decision points. For innovative, adaptive, collaborative human work the techniques of Human Interaction Management are required.
Workflow components
Single steps or components of a workflow can basically be defined by three parameters:
- 1. input description
- 2. transformation rules, algorithms
- 3. output description
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 systems
Workflow diagram systems are defined as "systems that help organizations to specify, execute, monitor, and coordinate the flow of work cases within a distributed office environment".
The system contains two basic components:
- 1. the workflow modeling component (sometimes called specification module, design environment or build time system) which enables administrators and analysts to define process and activities, analyze and simulate them, and assign them to people.
- 2. the workflow execution component, sometimes called the run-time system which most often consists of an
- execution interface seen by end-users and
- a workflow engine. The workflow engine is an execution environment which assists or performs the coordination of processes and activities. (See also: Load balancing (computing))
A Workflow Application is where various applications, components and people must be involved in the processing of data to complete an instance of a process. For example, consider a purchase order that moves through various departments for authorization and eventual purchase. The orders may be treated as messages, which are put into various queues for processing. A workflow process involves constant change and update. You can introduce new components into the operation without changing any code.
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