Workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatablepatterns of activity, enabled by thesystematic organization ofresources intoprocesses that transform materials, provide services, or process information.[1] It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group,[2] the work of an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
From a more abstract or higher-level perspective, workflow may be considered a view or representation of real work.[3] The flow being described may refer to adocument, service, orproduct that is being transferred from one step to another.
Workflows may be viewed as one fundamental building block to be combined with other parts of an organization's structure such as information technology,teams,projects andhierarchies.[4]
The modern history of workflows can be traced toFrederick Taylor[5] andHenry Gantt, although the term "workflow" was not in use as such during their lifetimes.[6] One of the earliest instances of the term "work flow" was in a railway engineering journal from 1921.[7]
The invention of thetypewriter and thecopier helped spread the study of the rational organization of labor from the manufacturing shop floor to the office. Filing systems and other sophisticated systems for managing physicalinformation flows evolved. Several events likely contributed to the development of formalized information workflows. First, the field of optimization theory matured and developedmathematical optimization techniques. For example, Soviet mathematician and economistLeonid Kantorovich developed the seeds oflinear programming in 1939 through efforts to solve a plywood manufacturer's production optimization issues.[11][12] Second,World War II and theApollo program drove process improvement forward with their demands for the rational organization of work.[13][14][15]
Basu and Kumar note that the term "workflow management" has been used to refer to tasks associated with the flow of information through thevalue chain rather than the flow of material goods: they characterise the definition, analysis and management of information as "workflow management". They note that workflow can be managed within a single organisation, where distinct roles are allocated to individual resources, and also across multiple organisations or distributed locations, where attention needs to be paid to the interactions between activities which are located at the organizational or locational boundaries. The transmission of information from one organization to another is a critical issue in this inter-organizational context and raises the importance of tasks they describe as "validation", "verification" and "data usage analysis".[18]
Aworkflow management system (WfMS) is a software system for setting up, performing, and monitoring a defined sequence of processes and tasks, with the broad goals of increasing productivity, reducing costs, becoming more agile, and improving information exchange within an organization.[19] These systems may be process-centric or data-centric, and they may represent the workflow as graphical maps. A workflow management system may also include an extensible interface so that external software applications can be integrated and provide support for wide area workflows that provide faster response times and improved productivity.[19]
The concept of workflow is closely related to several fields inoperations research and other areas that study the nature of work, either quantitatively or qualitatively, such asartificial intelligence (in particular, the sub-discipline of AI planning) andethnography. The term "workflow" is more commonly used in particular industries, such as in printing or professional domains such asclinical laboratories, where it may have particular specialized meanings.
Processes: A process is a more general notion than workflow and can apply to, for example, physical or biological processes, whereas a workflow is typically a process or collection of processes described in the context of work, such as all processes occurring in a machine shop.
Planning andscheduling: 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 andresource allocation calculations, completely defines a particularinstance 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 execute the same plan repeatedly.[20]
Flow control: This is a control concept applied to workflows, to distinguish from static control of buffers of material or orders, to mean a more dynamic control of flow speed and flow volumes in motion and in process. Such orientation to dynamic aspects is the basic foundation to prepare for more advanced job shop controls, such asjust-in-time or just-in-sequence.
In-transit visibility: This monitoring concept applies to transported material as well as to work in process or work in progress, i.e., workflows.
The following examples illustrate the variety of workflows seen in various contexts:
In machine shops, particularlyjob shops and flow shops, the flow of a part through the various processing stations is a workflow.
Insurance claims processing is an example of an information-intensive, document-driven workflow.[21]
Wikipedia editing can be modeled as a stochastic workflow.
TheGetting Things Done system is a model of personal workflow management for information workers.
In software development, support and other industries, the concept offollow-the-sun describes a process of passing unfinished work across time zones.[22]
In traditional offset and digital printing, the concept of workflow represents the process, people, and usually software technology (RIPs raster image processors or DFE digital front end) controllers that play a part in pre/post processing of print-related files, e.g., PDF pre-flight checking to make certain that fonts are embedded or that the imaging output to plate or digital press will be able to render the document intent properly for the image-output capabilities of the press that will print the final image.
In scientific experiments, the overall process (tasks and data flow) can be described as adirected acyclic graph (DAG). This DAG is referred to as a workflow, e.g., Brain Imaging workflows.[23][24]
In healthcare data analysis, a workflow can be identified or used to represent a sequence of steps which compose a complex data analysis.[25][26]
Inservice-oriented architectures, an application can be represented through an executable workflow, where different, possibly geographically distributed, service components interact to provide the corresponding functionality under the control of a workflow management system.[27]
Inshared services, an application can be in the practice of developing robotic process automation (called RPA or RPAAI for self-guided RPA 2.0 based on artificial intelligence) which results in the deployment of attended or unattended software agents to an organization's environment. These software agents, or robots, are deployed to perform pre-defined structured and repetitive sets of business tasks or processes. Artificial intelligence software robots are deployed to handleunstructured data sets and are deployed after performing and deploying robotic process automation.
Modeling: Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed usinggraph-based formalisms likePetri nets.
Measurement: Many of the concepts used to measure scheduling systems inoperations research are useful for measuring general workflows. These include throughput, processing time, and other regular metrics.
Specialized connotations: The term "workflow" has specialized connotations in information technology,document management, andimaging. Since 1993, one trade consortium specifically focused on workflow management and the interoperability of workflow management systems, theWorkflow Management Coalition.[28]
Scientific workflow systems: These found wide acceptance in the fields ofbioinformatics andcheminformatics in the early 2000s, when they met the need for multiple interconnected tools that handle multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows resembles the well-established practice ofPerl programming in life science research organizations, making this adoption a natural step towards more structured infrastructure setup.
Human-machine interaction: 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, and collaborative human work, the techniques ofhuman interaction management are required.
Workflow analysis: Workflow systems allow users to develop executable processes with no familiarity with formal programming concepts. Automated workflow analysis techniques can help users analyze the properties of user workflows to conduct verification of certain properties before executing them, e.g., analyzing flow control or data flow. Examples of tools based on formal analysis frameworks have been developed and used for the analysis of scientific workflows and can be extended to the analysis of other types of workflows.[29]
Evaluation of resources, both physical and human, is essential to evaluate hand-off points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks.[30]
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:
input description: the information, material and energy required to complete the step
transformation rules:algorithms which may be carried out by people or machines, or both
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(s). Thus, the essential description of a component actually comprises only input and output that are described fully in terms ofdata types and their meaning (semantics). The algorithms' or rules' descriptions 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.
When the components are non-local services that are invoked remotely via a computer network, such asWeb services, additional descriptors (such asQoS andavailability) also must be considered.[31]
Aworkflow application is asoftware application that automates, to at least some degree, a process or processes. The processes are usually business-related but can be any process that requires a series of steps to be automated viasoftware. Some steps of the process may require human intervention, such as approval or the development of custom text, but functions that can be automated should be handled by the application. Advanced applications allow users to introduce new components into the operation.[32]
^Smith, J.L. (July 2009)."The History of Modern Quality".PeoriaMagazines.com. Central Illinois Business Publishers, Inc. Retrieved20 January 2018.
^Shrader, C.R. (2009)."Chapter 9: ORSA and the Army, 1942–1995 - An Assessment"(PDF).History of Operations Research in the United States Army: Volume III, 1973–1995. Vol. 3. United States Army. pp. 277–288. Retrieved20 January 2018.
^Alvord, Brice (2013).Creating A Performance Based Culture In Your Workplace. Lulu.com.ISBN978-1105576072.
^D. Kyriazis; et al. (June 2008). "An innovative workflow mapping mechanism for Grids in the frame of Quality of Service".Future Generation Computer Systems.24 (6):498–511.doi:10.1016/j.future.2007.07.009.
^Jörg Becker; Michael zur Muehlen; Marc Gille (2002). "Workflow Application Architectures: Classification and Characteristics of Workflow-based Information Systems". In Fischer, L. (ed.).Workflow Handbook 2002. Lighthouse Point, FL: Future Strategies.CiteSeerX10.1.1.24.2311.
Ryan K. L. Ko, Stephen S. G. Lee, Eng Wah Lee (2009) Business Process Management (BPM) Standards: A Survey. In: Business Process Management Journal, Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Volume 15 Issue 5.ISSN1463-7154.PDF
Setrag Khoshafian, Marek Buckiewicz:Introduction to Groupware, Workflow and Workgroup Computing, John Wiley & Sons,ISBN0-471-02946-7
Rashid N. Kahn:Understanding Workflow Automation: A Guide to Enhancing Customer Loyalty, Prentice Hall,ISBN0-13-061918-3
Dan C. Marinescu:Internet-Based Workflow Management: Towards a Semantic Web, John Wiley & Sons,ISBN0-471-43962-2
Frank Leymann, Dieter Roller:Production Workflow: Concepts and Techniques, Prentice Hall,ISBN0-13-021753-0
Michael Jackson, Graham Twaddle:Business Process Implementation: Building Workflow Systems, Addison-Wesley,ISBN0-201-17768-4
Alec Sharp, Patrick McDermott:Workflow Modeling, Artech House Publishers,ISBN1-58053-021-4
Toni Hupp:Designing Work Groups, Jobs, and Work Flow, Pfeiffer & Company,ISBN0-7879-0063-X
Gary Poyssick, Steve Hannaford:Workflow Reengineering, Adobe,ISBN1-56830-265-7
Dave Chaffey:Groupware, Workflow and Intranets: Reengineering the Enterprise with Collaborative Software, Digital Press,ISBN1-55558-184-6
Wolfgang Gruber:Modeling and Transformation of Workflows With Temporal Constraints, IOS Press,ISBN1-58603-416-2
Andrzej Cichocki, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Darrell Woelk:Workflow and Process Automation Concepts and Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers,ISBN0-7923-8099-1
Alan R. Simon, William Marion:Workgroup Computing: Workflow, Groupware, and Messaging, McGraw-Hill,ISBN0-07-057628-9
Penny Ann Dolin:Exploring Digital Workflow, Delmar Thomson Learning,ISBN1-4018-9654-5
Gary Poyssick:Managing Digital Workflow, Prentice Hall,ISBN0-13-010911-8
Frank J. Romano:PDF Printing & Workflow, Prentice Hall,ISBN0-13-020837-X
James G. Kobielus:Workflow Strategies, Hungry Minds,ISBN0-7645-3012-7
Alan Rickayzen, Jocelyn Dart, Carsten Brennecke:Practical Workflow for SAP, Galileo,ISBN1-59229-006-X
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Angela Ashenden:E-process: Workflow for the E-business, Ovum,ISBN1-902566-65-3
Stanislaw Wrycza:Systems Development Methods for Databases, Enterprise Modeling, and Workflow Management, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers,ISBN0-306-46299-0
Database Support for Workflow Management, Kluwer Academic Publishers,ISBN0-7923-8414-8
