An Experiment in Light Workflow

Workflow tools have been successfully applied to automate work in many situations where the work is well regulated, there is a stable pattern of work, and there is a sufficiently high volume or sufficiently high importance to justify the cost of automating the activities. In many other circumstances there is a very mixed story of success and failure of workflow implementation. The Web also has changed work practices and increased the role of electronic documents, in particular, forms, as a support for many distributed tasks. In this paper we explore using a workflow approach based on fully self descriptive documents, that embed the information and instructions necessary to support processing the document, within the document. The traditional workflow engine or server that is typical of current workflow tools is discarded, but the document still allows a full work process to be applied, without necessarily enforcing the process. Ideally one would need a Web browser, and an email client, and no workflow system at all. This paper shows how this is not quite possible, but one can build a very small supporting application to achieve light workflow.