Workflow = OIS? A report of a workshop at the CSCW '94 conference

• Authors: Dirk E. Mahling;Carson Woo;Rick Blumenthal;Hans Schlichter;Thilo Horstman
• Venue: ACM SIGOIS Bulletin - Special issue: business process reengineering
• Year: 1995

The idea for this workshop was born during the 1993 Conference onOrganizational Computing Systems (COOCS). Researchers anddevelopers from academia and industry who attended the conferencewere sharing their observations and concerns on the absence of aconnection between earlier work presented at COOCS and the currentpresentations of workflow systems.Historically, COOCS has focused on office automation and officeinformation systems (OIS). During the 1980s numerous OIS werepresented at COOCS (e.g., [4, 6, 7, 19]). These systems acknowledgeover time that the office is a distributed place composed ofautonomous units and that activities, tasks, or procedures must besupported in conjunction with the accompanying office objects, suchas documents in paper or electronic format.Workflow systems started appearing in the 1990s. These systemswere commercially introduced as a new product category. Commercialworkflow systems take advantage of the growing base of installedpersonal computers or workstations, Local Area Networks, andappealing graphical user interfaces. Many participants at COOCS'93had a sense that workflow and OIS were dealing with similar issuesusing different labels. Both types of systems were concerned withthe support of dynamic aspects of knowledge work in organizations.Both types of systems have to address issues such as• the representation of activities• the definition of roles• the capture of time and deadlines• the integration of single user tools• the coordination of work results• the structure of the organizationThis list is probably not complete. Yet the shared issuesbetween workflow systems and office information systems aresignificant.To better understand the similarities and differences betweenworkflow and OIS, to share results and experiences in developingthese systems, and to foster potential collaboration between thetwo communities, Carson Woo and Dirk Mahling proposed this workshopat the 1994 Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference inChapel Hill, North Carolina. Researchers and developers wereinvited to submit position papers concerning their view of therelation between workflow and OIS. More than twenty statements wereselected. The workshop was conducted on October 22nd, 1994.The workshop consisted of a few presentations followed bybreakout discussions. The presentations were targeted to bring outimportant issues related to the workshop, and to facilitate thefocus of discussions during the breakout. The workshop begins bylooking into the current organizational needs and their implicationto automation (Section 2). This is to remind ourselves on why weare developing workflow and OIS systems. The problems with existingworkflow systems (Section 3) and how OIS influences the developmentof workflow systems (Section 4) were then discussed. Next, someenabling technologies for workflow and OIS were explored (Section5). Participants were then broken up into four groups to discussvarious issues including:• A metrics to evaluate workflow technology (Section6.1).• Differences between workflow and OIS (Section6.2).• Issues related to the deployment of workflow inorganizations (Section 6.3).• Should workflow be considered part of CSCW (Section6.4).This report summarizes the above presentations anddiscussions.