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

Abstract

The idea for this workshop was born during the 1993 Conference on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS). Researchers and developers from academia and industry who attended the conference were sharing their observations and concerns on the absence of a connection between earlier work presented at COOCS and the current presentations of workflow systems. Historically, COOCS has focused on office automation and office information systems (OIS). During the 1980s numerous OIS were presented at COOCS (e.g., [4, 6, 7, 19]). These systems acknowledge over time that the office is a distributed place composed of autonomous units and that activities, tasks, or procedures must be supported in conjunction with the accompanying office objects, such as documents in paper or electronic format. Workflow systems started appearing in the 1990s. These systems were commercially introduced as a new product category. Commercial workflow systems take advantage of the growing base of installed personal computers or workstations, Local Area Networks, and appealing graphical user interfaces. Many participants at COOCS'93 had a sense that workflow and OIS were dealing with similar issues using different labels. Both types of systems were concerned with the 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 organization This list is probably not complete. Yet the shared issues between workflow systems and office information systems are significant. To better understand the similarities and differences between workflow and OIS, to share results and experiences in developing these systems, and to foster potential collaboration between the two communities, Carson Woo and Dirk Mahling proposed this workshop at the 1994 Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Researchers and developers were invited to submit position papers concerning their view of the relation between workflow and OIS. More than twenty statements were selected. The workshop was conducted on October 22nd, 1994. The workshop consisted of a few presentations followed by breakout discussions. The presentations were targeted to bring out important issues related to the workshop, and to facilitate the focus of discussions during the breakout. The workshop begins by looking into the current organizational needs and their implication to automation (Section 2). This is to remind ourselves on why we are developing workflow and OIS systems. The problems with existing workflow systems (Section 3) and how OIS influences the development of workflow systems (Section 4) were then discussed. Next, some enabling technologies for workflow and OIS were explored (Section 5). Participants were then broken up into four groups to discuss various issues including: • A metrics to evaluate workflow technology (Section 6.1). • Differences between workflow and OIS (Section 6.2). • Issues related to the deployment of workflow in organizations (Section 6.3). • Should workflow be considered part of CSCW (Section 6.4). This report summarizes the above presentations and discussions.