Work Workflow And Information Systems

Work, Workflow and Information Systems

This volume brings together several perspectives on the nature of work processes in enterprises and how information systems can best support these processes. The genesis of this idea was the shared interests of the authors in how enterprises improve and change. The shared belief is that change of enterprises relates to change of work processes and the success of such changes relates to how work processes are supported by information systems. Thus, the papers in this volume address both the nature of work and the design of information systems to support work. This volume is divided into two main sections: work and workflow, and information systems. There are three papers in each section. The disciplines represented across these six papers include management, engineering, computing, and architecture. These four disciplines pursue work, workflow, and information systems from quite different perspectives - management to represent business practices and processes, engineering to represent the physical flows in the system, computing to represent the information flows, and architecture to represent human flows within and among physical spaces. Enterprises, of course, include all these types of flows.

Clinical Information Systems

Workflow Management Systems for Process Organisations

As the business environment has become more and more turbulent over the past decade, information technology has begun to run into the danger of becoming an impediment rather than a motor of progress. In order to deal with the need for rapid, continuous change, computer science is challenged to develop novel interrelated information and communication technologies, and to align them with the social needs of co-operating user groups, as well as the management requirements of formal organisations. Workflow systems are among the most advertised technologies addressing this trend, but they mean different things to different people. Computer scientists understand workflows as a way to extract control from application programs, thus making them more flexible. Bureaucratic organisations (and most commercial products) perceive them as supporting a linear or branching flow of documents from one workplace to another - the next try after the failure cf office automation. This book takes another perspective, that of the modem customer-driven and groupwork-oriented process organisation. Extending the language-action perspective from the CSCW field, its customer-oriented view of workflows enables novel kinds of business process analysis, and leads to interesting new combinations of information and co-operation technologies. Schal's empirical studies show some of the pitfalls resulting from a naive use of these technologies, and exemplify ways to get around these pitfalls.