Section 1.4. Workflow

1.4. Workflow

Not long agoexactly how long is hard to estimateeveryone used the term "workflow " to refer to the subject that is now called BPM . Already confounded by hype and an excess of ideas, somewhere along the way, the process world suffered an identity crisis. But is this transition from workflow to BPM merely nomenclatural or is it tied to a genuine change in meaning? Many contemporary observers think BPM and workflow have subtly different meanings, that BPM is superior to workflow management, and, in fact, has made it obsolescent.

The landmark survey of enterprise client/server technologies, Client/Server Survival Guide, positions workflow as a groupware technology that complements email, imaging document management, and calendar features. Workflow is the flow of work, encompassing the exchange and enrichment of information:

The classical workflow paradigm is a river that carries the flow of work from port to port and along the way value gets added. Workflow defines the operations that must be visited along the way and what needs to be done when exceptions occur.^[*]

^[*] R. Orfali, D. Harkey, and J. Edwards, Client/Server Survival Guide, Wiley, 1999.

In the past, workflow meant passing paper from person to person. Workflow technology improved things not only by managing the flow of work but also by digitizing the information, thereby making the process as automated and paperless as possible. Figure 1-10 illustrates a typical workflow scenario.

Figure 1-10. Workflow process based on scanned image

And though this approach helped speed up processes limited to a small workgroup, such as insurance claim handling, the perception of workflow by many observers, as argued by Staffware CEO Jon Pyke, is that it lacked integration capabilities. In the contemporary world of BPM, document imaging is a marginal technology; a process is expected to speak the modern dialects of XML, B2B, EAI, and web services.^[]

] J. Pyke, "From Workflow To Business Process Management: The Subtle Evolution,"Tom Baeyens points out that in modern BPM frameworks such as BPEL, a process knows to accept a message intended for it based on message correlation (that is, based on some aspect of the message that matches the process' internal state) rather than on explicit process ID; in other words, the process does not need to have a message sent explicitly to it. Further, the WfMC idea of the central enactment engine has been replaced by the notion of service endpoint, or communicating process; process flow has become decentralized and is now based on the idea of communicating processes.^[*] Figure 1-11 illustrates the BPM scenario.

^[*] T. Baeyens, "The State of Workflow,"http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=Workflow.

Figure 1-11. BPM communicating processes

The argument is compelling, and, in fact, grasping it is crucial to understanding what contemporary BPM is all about. But the position that workflow is the perfect expression of all the old process ideas is a straw man: workflow remains a useful word and is in fact more expressive than the term BPM, regardless of its mistaken attributions.