Workflow management systems (WFMS) are enjoying increasing popular ity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Organizational processes are de scriptions of an organization's activities engineered to fulfill its mission such as completing a business contract or satisfying a specific customer request. Gaining control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve each process or adapt them to changing requirements. The goal of WFMSs is to manage these organizational processes and coordinate their execution. was demonstrated in the first half The high degree of interest in WFMSs of the 1990s by a significant increase in the number of commercial products (once estimated to about 250) and the estimated market size (in combined $2 billion in 1996. Ensuing maturity product sales and services) of about is demonstrated by consolidations during the last year. Ranging from mere e-mail based calendar tools and flow charting tools to very sophisticated inte grated development environments for distributed enterprise-wide applications and systems to support programming in the large, these products are finding an eager market and opening up important research and development op portunities. In spite of their early success in the market place, however, the current generation of systems can benefit from further research and develop ment, especially for increasingly complex and mission-critical applications.

Current Trends in Data Management Technology reports on the most recent, important advances in data management as it applies to diverse issues, such as Web information management, workflow systems, electronic commerce, reengineering business processes, object-oriented databases, and more.

Computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW) is a research area that aims at integrating the works of several people involved in a common goal, inside a co-operative universe, through the sharing of resources in an efficient way. This report contains the papers presented at a conference on CSCW in design. Topics covered include: techniques, methods, and tools for CSCW in design; social organization of the CSCW process; integration of methods & tools within the work organization; co-operation in virtual enterprises and electronic businesses; CSCW in design & manufacturing; interaction between the CSCW approach and knowledge reuse as found in knowledge management; intelligent agent & multi-agent systems; Internet/World Wide Web and CSCW in design; and applications & test beds.

As the business environment has become more and more turbulent over the past decade, information technology has begun to run into the danger of becoming an impediment rather than a motor of progress. In order to deal with the need for rapid, continuous change, computer science is challenged to develop novel interrelated information and communication technologies, and to align them with the social needs of co-operating user groups, as well as the management requirements of formal organisations. Workflow systems are among the most advertised technologies addressing this trend, but they mean different things to different people. Computer scientists understand workflows as a way to extract control from application programs, thus making them more flexible. Bureaucratic organisations (and most commercial products) perceive them as supporting a linear or branching flow of documents from one workplace to another - the next try after the failure cf office automation. This book takes another perspective, that of the modem customer-driven and groupwork-oriented process organisation. Extending the language-action perspective from the CSCW field, its customer-oriented view of workflows enables novel kinds of business process analysis, and leads to interesting new combinations of information and co-operation technologies. Schal's empirical studies show some of the pitfalls resulting from a naive use of these technologies, and exemplify ways to get around these pitfalls.

With a focus on strategy and implementation, James Chang discusses business management practices and the technology that enables them. He analyzes the history of process management practices and demonstrates that BPM practices are a synthesis of radical change and continuous change practices. The book is relevant to both business and IT professi

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Conventional workflow management focuses on improving the efficiency of business processes within one organization. However, processes should not only be supported within the enterprise, but also when crossing organizational boundaries, e.g. in order to support new forms of collaborations as virtual enterprises. Due to the different nature of interorganizational workflows, conventional workflow technology cannot be directly applied. The most important requirement specific to interorganizational workflow systems is obviously that they are able to deal with heterogeneity and that it is not too expensive to achieve interoperability. Also maintaining the privacy of internal processes is a major concern, and security issues should be addressed. This diploma thesis gives an introduction to conventional and interorganizational workflow management, their aspects and concepts. It elaborates the requirements relevant for interorganizational workflow systems, describes the most important approaches, projects, and initiatives that currently exist in the area of interorganizational workflows, including XML-based approaches, the standards of the WfMC, electronic marketplaces and electronic contracting. An evaluation of these approaches based on criteria derived from the requirements and other characteristics shows the differing strengths and weaknesses. The XML-based approaches provide standards for the process interfaces, and can cope with heterogeneous environments very well. Some of them even allow spontaneous commerce with new trading partners without custom integration. Traditional EDI is in principle similar, but has many disadvantages. The standards of the WfMC enable integration with a very low effort, if they are followed by software providers. But privacy and security are potential problem areas and the models of interoperability that realistically can be supported are simple. Electronic marketplaces and electronic contracting are ideal, if a high number of business partners has to be supported and the services are chosen dynamically depending on the situation. But these services have to be comparable with rather simple interfaces. Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: 1.Introduction1 2.Workflow Management4 2.1Requirements on WfMSs6 2.2Workflow Modeling8 2.2.1The Functional Aspect: Workflows and Activities8 2.2.2The Operational Aspect: Applications9 2.2.3The Behavioral Aspect: Control Flow10 2.2.4The Informational [...]

& Includes a detailed case study - with complete source code - of building Web Services with Java AND .Net. & & Covers key emerging standards in transactioning, conversations, workflow, security and authentication, mobile and wireless, QoS, portlets, and management. & & Presents best practices based on authors' experiences building real world Web Services-based applications.

"This book introduces the perspective of customer-driven and teamwork-oriented process organisation. Its aim is to design and test concepts of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, especially concepts for workflow management systems, in order to fundamentally improve business processes in enterprises. Its methodological approach to analysis and design of cooperative networks is a response to shortcomings of current support systems and misunderstandings about cooperative work and team-based organisations. Several different commercial workflow management systems are presented and distinguished in terms of their main characteristics. Novel kinds of business process analysis are proposed, leading to interesting new combinations of information and cooperation technologies. The book not only presents ways to get around the pitfalls resulting from a naive use of these technologies, but also identifies design guidelines and critical success factors."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.

Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Application is a comprehensive report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from 1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) technologies. The very term {\em cooperative transactions} is in itself contradictory. Cooperation technologies, such as CSCW, aim at providing a framework for information exchange between cooperating (human) participants. In contrast, traditional transaction technologies allow concurrent users to operate on shared data, while providing them with the illusion of complete isolation from each other. To overcome this contradiction, the TRANSCOOP researchers had to come up with a new and original notion of correctness of concurrent executions, based on controlled exchange of information between concurrent users. Merging histories in accordance with prespecified commutativity rules among concurrent operations provides transactional guarantees to activities such as cooperative designing, which until now had to be carried out sequentially. As an interesting consequence, it also provides a basis for management of consistency between disconnected or mobile users who operate independently and yet, must occasionally reconcile their work with each other.