Report from the NSF workshop on workflow and process automation in information systems

An interdisciplinary research community needs to address challenging issues raised by applying workflow management technology in information systems. This conclusion results from the NSF workshop on Workflow and Process Automation in Information Systems which was held at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia during May 8-10, 1996. The workshop brought together active researchers and practitioners from several communities, with significant representation from database and distributed systems, software process and software engineering, and computer supported cooperative work. The presentations given at the workshop are available in the form of an electronic proceedings of this workshop at http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/activities/). This report is the joint work of selected representatives from the workshop and it documents the results of significant group discussions and exchange of ideas. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n In the 70's and the 80's, the main objective in using computers in the office was to automate individual work activities. Today, the main emphasis is on capturing and supporting organizational processes that depend on information systems and human resources. Organizational processes (also called business processes) are collections of activities that support critical * This workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, under the grant IRL9528870 (PI: Amit Sheth) awarded by the Database and Expert Systems Program and Information Technology and Organization Program (in the IRIS Division), and the Software Engineering Program (in the CCR Division). All opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations in any material resulting from this workshop are those of the workshop participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Various panel and workgroup discussions were led by members of the program and organization committeesGustavo Alonso, Omran Bukhres, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Dimitrioe Georgakopoulos, Stef Joosten, Marek Ftusinkiewicz, Ming Shan, Jack Wileden, Alexander Wolfand by Clarence Ellis, Gaff Kaiser, Adam Porter, and Walt Scacchi. Amit Sheth chaired the program and organization committees. organizational and business functions. The activities comprising such a process are tied together by a set of precedence relationships and have a common organizational objective. An important problem in designing and performing organizational processes is effective orchestration of their work activities. This involves distributing, scheduling, controlling, and coordinating work activities among human and information system resources. In addition, effective orchestration must deal with throughput delays, achieve efficient human and system resource allocation, and improve the quality of the resulting products (whether information service or matter). The need for capturing and supporting organizational processes has led scientists in several computer science disciplines to investigate the issues of understanding, modeling, analyzing, and building processes, and to support them through coordination and collaboration of humans and information systems.. In addition, there is an increasing emphasis on distributed technology for reliable and efficient automation of processes that rely on the availability and accessibility of information managed by critical information systems. The NSF Workshop on Workflow and Process Automation in Information Systems brought together active researchers in the areas outlined above and provided ample opportunities for sharing ideas and exchanging views through workgroup discussions. One of the first contributions of the workshop was the use of the term Work Activity Coordination to refer to the emerging field that attempts to combine all these activities. Work Activity Coordination draws from and contributes to multiple disciplines and goes beyond process automation and workflow management. We discuss these in more detail in the following paragraphs. A workflow process is an automated organizational process, which means that the coordination, control and communication of activities is automated, but the activities themselves can be either automated or performed by people. Workflow process management (also termed as workflow management) is the automated coordination, control and communication of S I G M O D Record, Vol. 25, No. 4, December 1996 55 work, both of people and computers, as its is required to carry out an organizational processes. This is performed by a workflow enactment service element (also called workflow manager, workflow server, workflow engine or simply workflow manager), which is controlled by a computerized representation of the organizational processes, and provides the required services in a computer network. An execution instance of a workflow process is sometimes called a workflow case. Users communicate with workflow enactment service by means of workflow clients, programs that provide an integrated user interface to all processes supported by the system. The technological system by which the organizational process is automated is called the workflow management system. Researchers in databases and distributed systems have exploited the techniques and tools from database management systems, transaction management, distributed object management and various communication infrastructures, to address the interoperability and coordination issues in supporting organizational processes involving multiple information systems and humans. Workflow management has also been proposed as programming-in-the-large for heterogeneous and distributed information system environments. Researchers in software process modeling and software engineering have developed formal languages for process modeling that have been used to define process analysis, simulation, and execution techniques, tools and integrated environments. They have Mso developed data collection and data analysis techniques that contribute to continuous process improvement. However, just as the aspects of managing an organization involve many skills and resources, various complementary aspects of supporting and managing organizational processes have been addressed by various disciplines in management, social sciences, and organiza-