Transactional workflow for telecommunication service management

Summary form only given. As workflow management systems become more complex and critical to an organisation's performance, there is an opportunity for a new generation of workflow management products to be developed that would greatly increase the scope of target application areas. The key areas of extensions to workflow management systems include the use of transactional semantics to increase reliability. Traditional transaction processing technology cannot be used directly for workflow management since applications in workflow management are different from the data oriented applications, such as funds transfer in banking applications. Customised workflow definition and management capability is required to capture business requirements and rules. This paper discusses the requirements and characteristics of transactional workflow management, examines applications of transactional workflow for telecommunication service management, and addresses architectural issues of transactional workflow and its role in the telecommunication service management platform.