Many groupware products have recently been A Workflow Architecture to Support Dynamic Change

Topic Description and Discussion : Many groupware products have recently been introduce d to the market [Dyson92]. A few of these products captur e knowledge of the organizational activity that they are assisting , but the vast majority do not. For example, a grou p document editor knows nothing about the organizationa l purpose of the document being edited. Organizationall y aware groupware can potentially lead to significantly mor e powerful and useful systems. One class of organizationall y aware groupware is workflow. Within the cscw94 workshop , we would like to define the issue of dynamic change i n workflow (and its extension to cscw systems in general). W e will then describe an architecture which allows this proble m to be addressed and solve d Workflow systems are designed to assist groups of people in carrying out work procedures, and contain organizational knowledge of where work flows in the default case. Workflow is defined as "systems that help organizations to specify, execute, monitor, and coordinate the flow of wor k items within a distributed office environment ." The syste m contains two basic components : the first component is th e workflow model, which enables administrators and analyst s to define procedures and activities, analyze and simulate them, and assign them to people. Many workflow product s have no model, so this component is called the "specifica-tion module" ; usage of this module is typically complete d before the flow of work tasks actually begins. Our researc h explores the hypothesis that a model of coordination is a useful entity in all phases of the workflow cycle. In our discussion , we present the Information Control Net (ICN) a s our workflow model. It allows us to precisely and mathematically define notions of correctness a The second component is the workflow execution module (the workflow system) consisting of the execution interface seen by end users and the execution environment whic h assists in coordinating and performing the procedures and activities . It enables the units of work to flow from one user' s workstation to another as the steps of a procedure are completed . Some of these steps may be executed in parallel ; some executed automatically by the computer system. Th e execution interface is utilized for all manual steps, and typically presents forms on the electronic desktop of appropriate workers (users .) The user fills …