Building the Process: Component-Based Workflow Architectures in a Distributed World

INTRODUCTION Extensive work has been done, across a number of fields, in modeling organizational processes. A tension has existed between attempts to provide rich expression of organizational activities and a desire to support work as it actually takes places. There is the strong suggestion, backed up by observation, that the specification of many work activities is ad-hoc, based on the context in which the activity occurs. Typically, these diversions from the “ideal” process have been described as exceptions. The exception is tolerated, the work instance modified, or the model itself modified to address the inconsistency. For much of work activity, however, exceptions are the rule [6]. The process model serves as a way of describing the goal, rather than a guide for execution. To address this, some systems attempt to use more loosely coupled rule or event based approaches to model processes, but these tend to lack mechanisms for abstraction and describing well understood procedures.