E-business has changed the processes associated with bricks and mortar companies to become faster, easier and more convenient, saving time and retaining a satisfied client base and ultimately offering the customer enhanced service levels. Workflow is key to the success of e-business because it provides integration of process automation, linking front office and back office systems. In the quest to achieve interoperability, a distinctive data format or protocol, bespoke to the workflow industry, has emerged, known as Wf -XML.
Developed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), a non-profit international organisation of workflow vendors, it represents the next step in the evolution of workflow interoperability standards. This is according to Mark Ehmke, managing director of Staffware SA and country chapter chair of the WfMC in South Africa.
To set the scenario, imagine a company that uses FedEx to ship its products to clients. Traditionally, a dedicated PC with proprietary software would be the method to arrange pickups directly from FedEx. Today, however, the FedEx website can be accessed to arrange shipment, with transparency a key advantage as the package progress is monitored in real-time.
"The benefits might seem one-sided in favour of the company utilising FedEx`s services, but think of the cost savings involved through customer self service," says Ehmke. "A FedEx support department is no longer necessary."
To enhance the benefits of a workflow system, Extensible Markup Language (XML), a meta-markup language, provides a format for describing structured data and is fast becoming the preferred protocol of the WfMC. This has resulted in the WfMC releasing a new workflow standard, Workflow XML (Wf-XML).
Developed as an application-independent way of representing organised or structured data, XML has been universally adopted as a common intermediate representation language for sending data, application information or structured documents like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages over the Internet. "Prior to Internet technology, EDI was the common vehicle for transmitting data packages to another system, which proved to be slow and cumbersome. XML, however, provides faster transactions of information by breaking the data down into smaller packages."
Workflow XML (Wf-XML) includes enhancements to the workflow environment by providing a well-formed and structured XML body protocol that consists of message structures containing headers and data. Driven by the WfMC`s interoperability initiative, Simple Workflow Access Protocol (SWAP), Workflow XML (Wf-XML) evolved to become an XML-based variant of the Interoperability Interface. This protocol can work with HTTP or a number of other transport mechanisms including e-mail, direct TCP/IP connection or Message Oriented Middleware.
XML facilitates more precise declarations of content and more meaningful search results across multiple platforms. By exploiting workflow interoperability based on XML, straightforward integration of both process and application data into an overall document type definition (DTD) to enable transport through the messaging environment is achieved.
Developments are underway to also exploit XML for encoding process definitions, which completes another aspect of integration between the process automation component and the infrastructure. This will allow a process defined in one workflow system to be transferred to another workflow engine. It also adds flexibility through synchronous or asynchronous message-handling capability. Being independent from transport mechanisms (not a proprietary protocol) and allowing easy extensibility through the use of XML and dynamic workflow context data is another advantage, which offers interoperability in workflow systems that can be extended to other types of systems.
Through the development of Wf-XML, an open standard is created and ideally suited for the development of web-based e-commerce. This advancement in interoperability standards will consign EDI to the history books and provide a safe choice for users utilising data interchange, Ehmke believes.
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