What Workflow Technology Can Do For Electronic Commerce

Electronic Commerce (EC) is a rapidly growing research and development area of very high practical relevance. A major challenge in successfully designing EC applications is to identify existing building-block technologies and integrate them into a common application framework. We argue that workflow management technology should be a key building block for EC applications. Workflow technology aims to provide as much computer support as possible to the modeling, execution, supervision, and possibly reengineering of business processes. Hence, it is beneficial to model major parts of EC applications also as workflows. We identify properties and requirements of workflows specific to EC, and describe solutions which can already be provided by current workflow management technology. In addition, we point out necessary extensions to the state of the art of workflow management which require future research in several directions. An electronic version of this paper is available at: http://www–dbs.cs.uni–sb.de