Workflow Systems and Knowledge Management

IntroductIon The business reengineering movement has left two lasting benefits: One is the identification of an organization as a set of processes (Davenport, 1993); the other is an emphasis on knowledge management (Davenport, 1997). The process orientation finds an expression in workflow systems. Processes have to be supported by knowledge management. Our purpose here is to provide an outline of how knowledge management relates to workflow systems. The main source of information on workflow systems is the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). In 1994, the coalition published a 55-page Workflow Reference Model (available from its Web site www.wfmc.org), which establishes a common vocabulary, a description of key software components of a workflow management system, and interfaces between these components. The WfMC has been publishing an annual workflow handbook, an example being Fischer (2004). This volume contains an evaluation of the Workflow Reference Model (Hollingsworth, 2004). For a textbook with exercises refer to van der Aalst and van Hee (2002). Important pioneering work in this area was done by Schael (1998). A somewhat dated bibliography has been compiled by the ISYS group of the University of Klagenfurt (ISYS, 2000). We start with a few definitions, based in part on the 65-page WfMC Terminology and Glossary document (also available from the WfMC Web site www.wfmc.org), and on van der Aalst and van Hee (2002). A business process is a set of linked activities that collectively realize a business objective or policy goal, and workflow is the result of automation of this process, in whole or part. A workflow comprises cases and resources. Cases are instances of the business process, and 2599 Workflow Systems and Knowledge Management resources support the process. For example, the set of resources of an automated process that provides information about flight arrivals has to include a constantly updated database of flight data and a set of telephones. Every enquiry submitted to this system is a case. A workflow system (WfS) manages the routing of cases through a workflow: A case " flows " from one station to another, and at each a task is performed on it. The task can be manual, automatic, or semiautomatic, but the definition of workflow as given suggests that the tasks of an ideal WfS should be automatic. It is important to realize that the ideal will not be achieved in the foreseeable future. Most WfSs of today are semiautomatic because they have to …