Three-tier View-based Mobile Workflows

Workflow technology has recently been employed not only within businesses but also as a framework for implementing services over the Internet. With the advancement and spreading of various mobile technologies and infrastructures, there is increasing demand for mobile users to connect to workflow management systems (WFMS). The basic requirement is to support SMS, WAP and web browsers on PDAs, in addition to regular web browsers on PCs. As the capabilities and bandwidth of these mobile devices are significantly inferior to computers over regular Internet connections, workflows have to be adapted to accommodate these limitations. Instead of redesigning or adapting workflows in an ad-hoc manner for different kinds of platforms, we propose a framework of workflow adaptation for mobile users based on three tiers of views: user interface views, data views and workflow views. User interface views provide alternative presentations of inputs and outputs. Data views summarize data over limited bandwidth and display them in different forms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach of applying workflow views to mobile workflow adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedures of a business process. The workflow view also serves as the centric mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by extending a flexible web-based WFMS E-ADOME into ME-ADOME. The concepts are illustrated with a workflow of procurement approval.