Research Issues in Workflow Systems

Recent recession has compelled many companies to find more effective ways to conduct their business. One remedy suggested is to model organizational dynamics as "business processes" and provide a suitable tool support for this. In this context the buzzwords business process re-engineering and workflow have been often quoted. The basic idea in this thinking is to view the functioning of an organization to consist of business processes and provide computer support for as large part of the processes as possible through "workflow systems". There are currently perhaps hundreds of products which claim to support workflows. We believe that workflow techniques are a proper way of supporting the process approach, but that the approach requires further development for several reasons. In this paper, we will discuss the development needs by presenting organizational and architectural considerations and requirements resulting from them for the workflow techniques. One central observation is that o..