Workflow Information Systems

This paper addresses a methodology for developing the various user interfaces (UI) of a workflow information system (WIS), which are advocated to automate business processes, following a model-centric approach based on the requirements and processes of the organization. The methodology applies to: 1) integrate human and machines based activities, in particular those involving interaction with IT applications and tools, 2) to identify how tasks are structured, who perform them, what their relative order is, how they are offered or assigned, and how tasks are being tracked. For this purpose, workflow is recursively decomposed into processes which are in turn decomposed into tasks. Each task gives rise to a task model whose structure, ordering, and connection with the domain model allows the automated generation of corresponding UIs in a transformational approach.

During the past two decades computer technology has revolutionized newspaper production work. As technology for the distribution of journalistic information in various forms has become more easily available, and with the Internet and the World Wide Web’s introduction into companies and households, the tendency has been for the larger media organizations and companies to have several publication channels at their disposal. This study addresses the issue of implementing cross media publishing in newspaper organizations. More precisely this paper models the information workflow that must be supported by a newspaper in order to produce the news in multiple formats.

Technology to support groups is rapidly growing in use. In recent years, the Web has become a privileged platform for implementing community-oriented workflows, giving rise to a new generation of workflow information systems. Specifically, the Web provides ubiquitous access to information, supports explicit distribution of business process across workers, workplaces, and computing platforms. These processes could be all supported by platform-independent user interfaces. This chapter presents a model-driven engineering method that provides designers with methodological guidance on how to systematically derive user interfaces of workflow information systems from a series of models. For this purpose, the workflow is recursively decomposed into processes which are in turn decomposed into tasks. Each task gives rise to a task model whose structure, ordering, and connection with the domain model allows the automated generation of corresponding user interfaces in a transformational approach. The various models involved in the method can be edited in a workflow editor based on Petri nets and simulated interactively.