A Model to Support Routine Office-Work

In most offices complex routine work, called cases, has to be dealt with. Characteristic is, that cases have a predefined structure that can be split into tasks to be shared between different persons carrying out their parts in a cooperative manner. The handling of cases can be supported by an electronic system if the structure of cases is formally described and thus made interpretable. This article outlines data structures needed for an electronic case-handling system and sketches an execution model for arbitrary cases that fits into the architecture of current office-information systems. It is assumed throughout this article that all case data are held in a relational database since the nature of case handling requires concurrent access to all data under control of a RDBMS.