Dynamic business operations need more than workflow

Workflow applications are limited in their ability to support the flexibility corporations demand for their increasingly competitive, complex and dynamic operations in the global economy, says Riaan van Schalkwyk, solutions architect at Computer Sciences Corporation in South Africa.

"There needs to be a paradigm shift in technology to overcome the limitations of workflow systems and build and deploy robust business process management systems (BPMS). These will deliver the kind of information systems that businesses now demand as new sources of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) is a new journey."

Van Schalkwyk says workflow must be incorporated within the larger strategy of managing business processes, which are much more than the flow of work. A process does not replace just workflow, but encompasses every element of applications.

"There are thousands of possible business processes that have nothing to do with the standard model of workflow inherent in existing workflow products - processes, such as change management and product lifecycle management, where modeling using workflow is either awkward, requires modification or is impossible."

He adds that workflow management is a useful form of process management and that advocates of workflow-based technologies will continue to use and promote their products under the banner of BPM.

"Many workflow vendors use the term BPM as a marketing message for their products because it appeals to those urgently grappling with the business process issue, and it is more saleable than workflow, which is an older term."

Today, the IT function is bogged down in a host of integration challenges between a host of different systems and engines, including numerous applications, workflow systems, integration hubs, collaboration tools, business-to-business exchanges and others.

"There is extreme complexity in business processes which, if taken on piecemeal, are not only costly to acquire, build and maintain, but are quite inflexible in the natural evolution of the business. The BPMS is a pragmatic step forward in meeting these challenges," he says.

A BPMS heralds a change in the way IT systems are built - from applications built on a data foundation towards process management tools built on a process foundation. It is fundamentally different to workflow and can unify all existing IT systems.

Van Schalkwyk stresses that today`s business operations are dynamic, ill-defined and unstructured. Workflow lacks the flexibility to support this because it is built to control the flow of activity and is too prescriptive.

Also, CIOs have been reluctant to commit to the workflow model as their primary systems development methodology because it would require them to commit to a single vendor. The differences between workflow engines would make it difficult, if not impossible, to move workflow management systems (WFMS) between different vendors` products.

Workflow systems view the world in a way that limits the types of processes they support. Some of the most common processes used in business today cannot be modeled and deployed using workflow engines.

Van Schalkwyk says WFMSs allow for the modeling of any workflow because they include workflow engines. A BPMS allows for the modeling of the meta-model of how workflows work because it contains an implementation of Pi-Calculus, a universal mathematical language for processes.

Once a process meta-model has been defined on the BPMS - such as the way electronic mail, workflow or a supply chain work - it is simply another process that can participate in the design of any other process. On a BPMS, a workflow activity may be modeled as a process in its own right.

"A workflow engine engrains the workflow process meta-model into its software code, just as an ERP system engrains its processes into software. They are limited to expressing only the processes they were designed to express and become rigid."

A BPMS can support the most complex, dynamic and extended processes. Such processes are persistent, reliable and transactional. They are a new class of business asset - dynamic processes as opposed to static documents, says Van Schalkwyk. Within a process all data is encoded in the context of its use - past, present and future process design. A BPMS manages this new class of digital content and can therefore be considered to be the platform upon which the IT industry will build the next generation of enterprise business applications, including the next generation of ERP, document management, workflow, content and knowledge management. The BPMS puts process at the heart of enterprise architecture.

"The true benefits of process systems in terms of resource utilisation will emerge over the next few years as practical experience grows. They will eventually break free of legacy systems and demonstrate their value in their own right."