To begin our investigation of the domain of workflow, we first offer a historical context to the domain of workflow. It is also essential to distingish the processes that workflow systems are concerned with. In this module, three types of organizational processes are distingished: material, information and human.
Material Processes - Organizations have traditionally produced products in the form of materials. This is the standard interpretation of work.
Information Processes - More recently, in the last few decades, organizations have been concerned with identifying, studying and optimizing their information processes. Much work is now concerned only with information, although the information processes are often used to drive material processes.
Human Processes - Recently, organizations have realized that it is not enough to use information technology to address their crucial concerns. This realization and the present breakdown in the productivity of knowledge-based workers has lead to an identification of a new type of process - the human process. The human process is concerned with the coordination of people and organizations through the committments they make. Just as information processes can be used to drive material processes, human processes are used to drive and coordinate information and material processes.
All three processes, the material, information and human, are organizational processes and workflow systems have been built to operate primarily with information processes, although some workflow systems have been built for both human and information processes. We will only address human and information processes in this module. Where commertial organizations are concerned, the human process is called a 'business process'.
Historically, we have developed very good models of material and information processes - unfortunately, these models don't allow us to view or measure how satisfied the user is in these models. Using models of human processes integrated with the other models allows the identification and measurement of user satisfaction, in addition to the usual system metrics of the other models.
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MRH
9/14/94