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Workflow

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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 Petri nets.

While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of groupware 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, ensuring dependencies which are not neccessarily data-driven and may include human agents.

Scientific workflows found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000-s, 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 organization, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.

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 document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 70-s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure 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.

See also

References

  • 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
  • Holly Yu: Content and Work Flow Management for Library Websites: Case Studies, Information Science Publishing, ISBN 1591405343
  • Wil van der Aalst, Kees van Hee: Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems, B&T, ISBN 0-262-72046-9
  • 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 1568302657
  • 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 1586034162
  • Andrzej Cichocki, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Darrell Woelk: Workflow and Process Automation Concepts and Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 0792380991
  • Alan R. Simon, William Marion: Workgroup Computing: Workflow, Groupware, and Messaging, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0070576289
  • Penny Ann Dolin: Exploring Digital Workflow, Delmar Thomson Learning, ISBN 1-4018-9654-5
  • Gary Poyssick: Managing Digital Workflow, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0130109118
  • Frank J. Romano: PDF Printing & Workflow, Prentice Hall, ISBN 013020837X
  • James G. Kobielus: Workflow Strategies, Hungry Minds, ISBN 0764530127
  • Alan Rickayzen, Jocelyn Dart, Carsten Brennecke: Practical Workflow for SAP, Galileo, ISBN 159229006X
  • Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Angela Ashenden: E-process: Workflow for the E-business, Ovum, ISBN 1902566653
  • 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
  • Tools for scientific workflow
    • Taverna Open-source workflow system particularly focussed on bioinformatics applications
    • Kepler Open-source scientific workflow system, based on Ptolemy II
    • GridNexus UNC Wilmington scientific workflow grid computing project, also based on Ptolemy II
    • SPA Scientific Process Automation, scientific Problem Solving Environment (PSE) with an intuitive graphical user interface that allows scientists to easily create exploratory data flows (workflows). Also based on Ptolemy II
    • Triana GUI based scientific workflow, for domain independent applications.
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