In this volume Gerold Riempp examines the interaction of different workflow management systems (WFMS) in geographically-distributed and legally-separate organisations. This is an emerging field of research known as Wide Area Workflow Management (WAWM). He examines the technical and managerial aspects of workflow management via a framework which he has developed to describe the problems involved in WAWM and to find viable solutions. Based on this theoretical framework, the author also develops a prototype software framework - the Wide Area GroupFlow System - to demonstrate the solutions via practical software tools. The tools will be available to the reader via the WWW. Also included are the results of case studies from some of the 15 developers who have been using this software over the past two years.

The Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) issued Management Reform Memorandum No. 2 on May 21, 1997, which directed that DOD move to a totally paper-free contract writing, administration, finance, and auditing process by January 1, 2000. Although numerous actions were initiated, DOD has not yet reached this goal. One of the initiatives was the development of the Wide Area Workflow-Receipts and Acceptance (WAWF-RA) application, which was to provide paperless contracting, receiving, and invoicing DOD-wide. The WAWF-RA allows vendors to submit their invoices and receiving reports electronically to DOD and route them through a workflow system for inspection, acceptance, receiving, and payment.

Workflow management systems (WFMS) are enjoying increasing popular ity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Organizational processes are de scriptions of an organization's activities engineered to fulfill its mission such as completing a business contract or satisfying a specific customer request. Gaining control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve each process or adapt them to changing requirements. The goal of WFMSs is to manage these organizational processes and coordinate their execution. was demonstrated in the first half The high degree of interest in WFMSs of the 1990s by a significant increase in the number of commercial products (once estimated to about 250) and the estimated market size (in combined $2 billion in 1996. Ensuing maturity product sales and services) of about is demonstrated by consolidations during the last year. Ranging from mere e-mail based calendar tools and flow charting tools to very sophisticated inte grated development environments for distributed enterprise-wide applications and systems to support programming in the large, these products are finding an eager market and opening up important research and development op portunities. In spite of their early success in the market place, however, the current generation of systems can benefit from further research and develop ment, especially for increasingly complex and mission-critical applications.

Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project presents the results of the ESPRIT WIDE project on advanced database support for workflow management. The book discusses the state of the art in combining database management and workflow management technology, especially in the areas of transaction and exception management. This technology is complemented by a high-level conceptual workflow model and associated workflow application design methodology. In WIDE, advanced base technology is applied, like a distributed computing model based on the corba standard. The usability of the WIDE approach is documented in this book by a discussion of two real-world applications from the insurance and health care domains. Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project serves as an excellent reference, and may be used for advanced courses on database and workflow management systems.

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.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to workflow management, the management of business processes with information technology. By defining, analyzing, and redesigning an organization's resources and operations, workflow management systems ensure that the right information reaches the right person or computer application at the right time. The book provides a basic overview of workflow terminology and organization, as well as detailed coverage of workflow modeling with Petri nets. Because Petri nets make definitions easier to understand for nonexperts, they facilitate communication between designers and users. The book includes a chapter of case studies, review exercises, and a glossary. A special Web site developed by the authors, www.workflowcourse.com, features animation, interactive examples, lecture materials, exercises and solutions, relevant links, and other valuable resources for the classroom.

This book constitutes the proceedings of two events held at the CAiSE conference and relating to the areas of enterprise, business process and information systems modeling: The 20th International Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support, BPMDS 2019, and the 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Development, EMMSAD 2019. The conferences took place in Rome, Italy, in June 2019. The 7 full and 2 short papers accepted for BPMDS were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 20 submissions; for EMMSAD 15 full papers were accepted from 38 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named as follows: BPMDS: large and complex business process modeling and development; execution and understandability of declarative process models; novel approaches in enterprise modeling; transformative business process modeling, development, and support. EMMSAD: foundations of modeling and method engineering; enterprise process and capability modeling; information systems and requirements modeling; domain-specific and ontology modeling; and evaluation of modeling approaches.