Workflow management

This book is about the management of business processes. This is certainly not a new topic. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it has been written about from every possible point of view?economic, sociological, psychological, accountancy, mechanical engineering and business administration. In this book, we examine the management of business processes from the perspective of computing, or?to put it more broadly?of information technology. The reason is that information technology has made huge leaps forward in recent years, resulting in the creation of completely new ways of organizing business processes. The development of generic software packages for managing business processes?so-called workflow management systems (WFMS)?is particularly important in this respect. Until recently, the golden rule was: First organize, then computerize. This implied that processes were developed with the implicit assumption that the business process would primarily be managed by people. Then an organizational structure would be developed under which groups of people, or departments, were allocated particular tasks. Only then did people consider whether computers?or rather, information systems? could partially support, or even take over, the work. This approach does not sufficiently examine the opportunities offered by information systems. We have now reached a turning point: we first design business processes in a more abstract way, without considering implementation, and then we design the information systems and the organization hand in hand. In fact, we decide whether each task in a process should be performed by an information system or a person.