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Background
Computer technology for process support has a
long tradition. Previous attempts to automate office work and
increase productivity failed, because individual activities were
automated without an understanding of how those activities fit into
the entire business process. On the basis of past experience of
procedure automation systems, in late 80s a new technology was
introduced which falls under the domain of workflow management
technology. It is not a new technology for procedure automation, but
takes the formal part of procedure processing applications and
combines it with general communication, knowledge management and
information sharing facilities. This project was initially conceived
to exploit this technology to automate clinical processes in
“Medical Informatics Systems” with the possibility of making it
generic to provide a solid basis for other domains as well.
Definition of Workflow Management
System:
According to WFMC, “A Workflow Management System”
is
“A system that completely defines, manages and
executes “workflows” through the execution of software whose order
of execution is driven by a compute representation of the workflow
logic.”
Major
functional parts of workflow management system
So far the
prototype that is under development targets the generic features of
Workflow Management System. The prototype is designed and
implemented in such a way that it can provide the basis for a
variety of domains ranging from clinical processes, administrative
processes and business processes to manufacturing processes.
At the highest
level the project has these three functional parts
1.
The “Build Time” functions are concerned with defining, and
possibly modeling, the workflow process and its constituent
activities.
2.
The “Run Time” control functions are concerned with managing
the workflow processes in an operational environment and sequencing
the various activities to be handled as part of each process.
3.
The run-time interactions with human users and IT application
tools for processing the various activity steps. It includes client
interface for human interaction and external application
interface.
For more
detail please see the relevant links.
Current
Status of project
Most
of the major parts have been implemented. The different modules of
“Run Time” part have been integrated but not completely tested. The
“Build Time” part is being integrated. Client Interface is also
being implemented. The modules that are yet to be implemented are
Monitoring and Administrative Tool and Transaction Handling
mechanism.
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