G. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4):276--294, Dec. 1996.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....as in the planning work case. The challenge for both state of the art collaborative systems and workflow management systems is to support dynamically different styles of coordination, ranging from cases where the situated work is the best approach to whose where strict coordination is required [7, 16]. For the purpose, Activity Theory has been explored as a possible conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of collaborative work activities, including both situated and planning work [2] Analogously, in this work we claim that both subjective and objective approaches can be ....

G. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4):276--294, Dec. 1996.

....definition and manually change the course of the process. For example, she may find out that the workflow started to execute with some erroneous information. This feature enables workflow systems to handle exceptions and unique situations. Early workflow systems didn t provide this functionality [89]. They frustrated their users, who felt that the system was merely enforcing rigid rules. Current workflow systems aim at providing various degrees of flexibility [53] Consequently, applications that use workflow to implement processes allow their users to manually change running processes by ....

....software applications Software that leverages computer and network services to assist a group of workers in conducting their work is referred to as groupware. While both workflow and situated work belong to groupware, they differ about how the collaborative work is performed, as Nutt [89] summarizes: The situated work camp advocates the use of evolutionary systems to provide increasingly sophisticated personal productivity tools, with little explicit attempt to have the system stage the work to be performed. The workflow camp advocates the use of models and systems to ....

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Gary J. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4):276--294, December 1996.

....of the persistence component, log it to a persistent store. 4.7 Manual Intervention Workflow management systems must allow authorized users to change the sequencing of activities while the workflow is running. If they don t, their users perceive them as too rigid and avoid using them altogether [21]. In the case of an activity based process model, this corresponds to manually moving the flow of control from one node of the activity map to another. Several studies identify the support for manual intervention as one of the important requirements of workflow systems. Despite their findings, ....

Gary J. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4):276--294, December 1996.

....objects change their state frequently, though other office objects do not tend to change at all. Scenario D: Model Based Virtual Environment. This scenario describes modelbased virtual environments as collaborative environments containing a model to provide context for the collaboration [NAB 95] [Nutt97]. In these systems, multiple 76 workers interact with one another and with isolated parts of a larger artifact (a shared model of work, software methodology, CAD design, etc. In this scenario, users may interact with many different components at a relatively high rate, but these interactions do ....

Gary J. Nutt. (1996, December). The Evolution Toward Flexible Workflow Systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4) , 276-294.

....controlled execution of prescribed processes. As the scope of workflow applications extends to cover less structured work situations and as work situations are becoming more dynamic, there has also been an increasing need for supporting more flexible process and less formal group interaction [14]. In practice, a task (or process) often includes a mix of un structured, semi structured, and structured parts. For more structured parts formal coordination mechanisms are useful while for less structured parts informal coordination means are required. New projects or tasks often lead to new ....

....have high computation support for specific tasks, and to provide variable coordination support. Such systems should be able to support both situated work (which can not be truly represented in a prescriptive workflow) and workflow (or some customized combination of the two) on a case by case basis [14]. Ellis argues that successful workflow systems must extend the process models to include declarational specifications about the goal of a task (or a process) alongside operational ones [3] Cooperative hypermedia systems and many other groupware systems can provide some informal coordination ....

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Nutt, G. The evolution towards flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering Journal, Special Issue On Workflow Systems, 3, 4 (Dec., 1996), 276--294.

.... workflow model (Bolcer, 1998) unexpected contingencies (Saastamoinen, 1994) and unmodeled changes in the environment (Tolone, 1996) Efforts to evolve, expand, and optimize the workflow process may also be sources of change that must be accommodated by the workflow system (Abbot and Sarin, 1994) (Nutt, 1996). Traditional approaches have utilized inflexible control policies that make reactive control and graceful exception handling difficult, if not impossible, tasks. Exceptions impact a workflow model at varying levels of significance. Some exceptions cause only minor perturbations to the work ....

....arise from a number of different areas of research. They possess overlapping constraints which limit their support for dynamic adaptation to change as well as the ease of their integration and adaptation to existing work environments. Even though the trend is toward convergence (Ellis and Nutt, 1996) we address issues of individual approaches here, highlighting obstacles to supporting exception handling and flexible process execution. 3.1 Process Technology Process technologies typically assume closed world data consistency (Osterweil, 1998) This is usually enforced by limiting the actions ....

Nutt, G. (1996); "The Evolutions Toward Flexible Workflow Systems" Distributed Systems Engineering, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 276-294, December, 1996.

.... data [4] divergence of tasks from the underlying workflow model [2] unexpected contingencies [13] and unmodeled changes in the environment [15] Efforts to evolve, expand, and optimize the workflow process may also be sources of change that must be accommodated by the workflow system [1][11]. Traditional approaches have utilized inflexible control policies that make reactive control and graceful exception handling difficult, if not impossible, tasks. Our research in development of the Endeavors dynamic web based workflow system [9] 14] has suggested a number of key requirements that ....

Nutt, G., "The Evolutions Toward Flexible Workflow Systems" Distributed Systems Engineering, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 276-294, December, 1996.

....and they usually enforce a strict execution of the pre modeled process. Although they allow online modification of staff definition or the exchange of application components during run time, they are rather weak with respect to dynamic structural changes of running workflow instances (see [EKR95] [Nutt96], ReDa97] Shet96] Sieb96] There are some systems (cf. KRW90] GHS95] allowing the users to deviate from the pre planned process at run time, but at the risk of inconsistencies and errors. In addition little support is available for the abortion of running WF instances and for a ....

.... procedures ( HsKl96] Tee96] the support of adaptive WFs by applying concepts like late binding or late modeling ( Han96] Hage97] the support of adaptive WFs by allowing dynamic changes of running WF instances; a dynamic change may affect a single WF instance ( JST97] KRW90] [Nutt96], Sieb96] Tee96] or all (or part of the) active instances of a specific WF type (WF evolution) BPS97] Casa96] EKR95] the integration of WfMSs with collaboration and groupware technologies to combine formal and wellstructured processes with informal group processes ( ShKo97] ....

Nutt, G.: The Evolution Towards Flexible Workflow Systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1996, pp. 276-294

....change their state frequently, though other office objects do not tend to change at all. Scenario D: Model Based Virtual Environment. Elsewhere we have described model based virtual environments as collaborative environments containing a model to provide context for the collaboration [Nutt95] [Nutt97]. In these systems, multiple workers interact with one another and with isolated parts of a larger artifact (a shared model of work, software methodology, etc. In this scenario, an avatar may interact with many different components at a relatively high rate, but these pair wise interactions need ....

Nutt, Gary J., "The Evolution Toward Flexible Workflow Systems," Distributed Systems Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1996), 276-294.

....flexible coordination mechanisms proposed in this paper. There have been many development efforts on merging workflow and groupware [8] The basic approach taken by the workflow community is to add some groupware services to existing workflow systems for informal coordination or exception handling [10], such as the recent work in the Exotica project to integrate FlowMark and Notes [8] In some of such integrated systems, embedded hypertext links are used for accessing background information. The CHIPS system integrates process support capabilities (i.e. more formal coordination support) into ....

Nutt, G. The evolution towards flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering Journal, Special Issue On Workflow Systems, 3, 4 (Dec., 1996), 276-294

....Room [24] under development by the Collaboration Systems Research Group at the University of Colorado. The VPR is a multiperson, distributed virtual environment, intended to support collaboration among human users in a free form communication environment with embedded domain specific tools [26]. The VPR supports free form communication in a manner similar to various other electronic meeting rooms [13, 23, 33] and virtual environments [2, 4, 10] It differs from many other virtual environments in that it is designed to be extended with domain specific tools that provide additional ....

Gary J. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3:276--294, 1996.

.... 2 1. Introduction Due to the heterogeneity of the involved process steps and today s demand on continuous process improvement, flexibility and adaptability is one of the most challenging requirements for a workflow management system (WFMS) and its underlying workflow modeling language [44]. Flexibility of a WFMS encompasses two fundamental aspects: 1) The specification of flexible and adequate workflows to express in advance an accurate and less restrictive behavior, e.g. to support cooperative activities within a process centered environment (cf. 15, 32 27] or to provide ....

Nutt G.J.: The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4), pp. 276294 (1996). - 25 -

....to the user. 1. Introduction Due to the heterogeneity of the involved process steps and today s demand on continuous process improvement, flexibility and adaptability is one of the most challenging requirements for a workflow management system (WFMS) and its underlying workflow modeling language [21]. Flexibility of a WFMS encompasses two fundamental aspects: 1) The specification of a flexible execution behavior to express in advance an accurate and less restrictive behavior, e.g. to support cooperative activities within a process centered environment (cf. 8, 16, 13] 2) The evolution ....

Nutt, G.J.: "The evolution toward flexible workflow systems ", Distributed Systems Engineering, 3(4), Dec. 1996; pp. 276-294.

....portions of the work to be done, it is useful to be able to capture a description or model of these organizational action patterns. The language used for this might be called a process modeling language. Some of the activities, called elementary, are described using a computation language [32, 19]. This may vary from a very detailed, procedural program for computer execution to a screen displaying an English description of the goals to be accomplished, accompanied by a menu offering a variety of ways for a person to indicate when and whether the task has been successfully carried out. More ....

....of possibly polluted information when deviations are allowed, assuming that any deviant action produces suspect data 7 . As future work we will be considering such a pollution analysis tool as support for users who are asked to choose which values are to be blamed for an exception. In what [32] calls the situated work camp, 7] is a report of a workflow system where activities are modeled as an executable network of obligations, a request from one person to other agents. An obligation network is constructed based on a overhead transparency metaphor, and sheets are categorized into ....

G. Nutt, "The evolution toward flexible workflow systems", Distributed Systems Engineering, Dec. 1996.

....(e.g. MBone [11] chat rooms, etc. computers and networks have not provided the level of utility to users that has been done by other group oriented technologies such as the telephone. Elsewhere we described barriers to the effective use of distributed systems for supporting collaborative work [30]. Briefly, the fundamental issues relate to the style in which the system provides its support: In the situated work style, the computer is expected to be a logical lever for the work performed by an individual, with the work of partitioning a job into tasks then coordinating the execution of ....

Gary J. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3:276--294, 1996.

....Planning Room, under development by the Collaboration Systems Research Group at the University of Colorado. The VPR is a multiperson, distributed virtual environment, intended to support collaboration among human users in a free form communi1 cation environment with embedded domainspecific tools [22]. The VPR supports free form communication in a manner similar to various other electronic meeting rooms [8, 20, 28] and virtual environments [1, 3, 5] It differs from many other virtual environments in that it is designed to be extended with domain specific tools that provide additional ....

Gary J. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3:276--294, 1996.

.... Miami, FL y Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Colorado at Denver, Denver, CO 1 The Application Domain To support collaboration among human users, computers need to provide an effective set of domain specific tools embedded in a free form communication environment [18]. The virtual planning room (VPR) 19] is a multiperson virtual environment (VE) supporting free form communication in a manner similar to electronic meeting rooms [7, 23] and other virtual environments [1, 3, 5] It differs from most other virtual environments in that it is designed to be ....

Gary J. Nutt. The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. Distributed Systems Engineering, 3:276--294, 1996.

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