Organizational Memory supported Workflow Management

Business processes are by nature information-intensive and require IT support. Database systems solve the basic need for secure and efficient data storage and access. As such they are well-understood and widely applied. Workflow management systems, currently being added to support and optimize formal business processes, distribute jobs among employees. Recently, researchers and practioners started to promote the idea to explicitly represent the knowledge of the enterprise as so-called "Organizational Memory". Such knowledge includes the goals of the enterprise, its tasks, its rules and its resources. This article investigates the interrelationship and interplay of organizational memory systems with workflow management systems. We describe experiences gained from a concrete integration project at Swiss Life, an insurance company mainly engaged in the private life insurance and pension scheme management business. Result of the study is a formal model of the relationship of information handled in the two systems and a specification how such systems can interoperate to provide knowledge-based workflow management.