'Workflow Management vital for e-commerce success'

E-Commerce is a pervasive activity today. With the growth of the Internet, it

has caught the popular imagination and has even penetrated political thought in

ways that we have not seen for a generation. The delivery of business through

E-Commerce involves the deployment of business processes for which workflow is

an obvious supporting technology. It is therefore more than necessary to

understand the management of this technology for E-Commerce success.

The concept of WFM

The concept of workflow management can be perceived only if the concept of

workflow is clearly understood. Here's a GIGA group definition for workflow: we

call the operational aspects of a business process - the sequence of tasks and

who performs them, the information flow to support the tasks, and the tracking

and reporting mechanisms that measure and control them - the workflow".

Workflow management (WFM) as a concept has existed for many years, but it is

only in the last few years that it has become very popular in the commercial

world. The aim of WFM is to automate the tracking of the states of the tasks of

a workflow, and allowing specification of preconditions to decide when tasks are

ready to be executed and further for information flow between tasks. One of the

chief goals of WFM is to separate process logic from task or activity logic,

which is embedded in individual user applications. This separation allows the

two to be independently modified and the same task logic to be reused in

different processes, thereby promoting software reuse as in object-oriented

programming, and the integration of heterogeneous applications, which were

developed in isolation.

The focus in the last few years on business process reengineering, especially

with regard to the supply chain, by enterprises as a cost saving and service

improvement measure has contributed significantly to the recent popularity of

WFMSs. The emergence of the worldwide web as the means for carrying out

electronic commerce is also contributing to this trend. EDI (electronic data

interchange) on the Internet and the emerging XML (extended markup language)

standard are also going to be playing significant roles in the emergence of

web-based workflows.

Vertical applications

WFMSs have been widely deployed in the following types of

businesses/organizations: banking, accounting, manufacturing, brokerage,

insurance, healthcare and government departments. Traditionally, WFMSs and

workflow applications have been divided into four broad categories: production,

administrative, collaborative and ad hoc. While this is not a very strict

categorization, it helps to distinguish the design points of different products

somewhat reasonably. Over the years, vendors have tried to reposition/redesign

their products to cover more of this spectrum of applications.

Technical challenges

WFM is a very interesting area from a technical perspective since it brings

together principles, methodologies and technologies from various areas of

computer science and management science. It includes various concepts from areas

like database management, client server computing, programming languages,

heterogeneous distributed computing, mobile computing, graphical user

interfaces, application (new and legacy) and subsystem (e.g., CICS and MQSeries)

integration, messaging, document management, simulation, and business practices

and reengineering. Integrating different concepts from these areas poses many

challenges. Factors like scalability, high availability, manageability,

usability and security also further aggravate the demands on the designs of

WFMSs.

In conclusion, Workflow management is a potion that has all the ingredients

to enhance organizational efficiency in an e-commerce scenario.