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.

Authors and Affiliations

Schalksmühle, Germany

Thomas Schäl
Cutro, Italy

Thomas Schäl

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Workflow Management Systems for Process Organisations
Authors: Thomas Schäl
Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-21574-6
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1996
eBook ISBN: 978-3-662-21574-6Published: 11 November 2013
Series ISSN: 0302-9743
Series E-ISSN: 1611-3349
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 208
Topics: User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, IT in Business, Organization

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction

From Functional to Process Organisation

Analysis and design of co-operative networks

Workflow management technology

Field study I: The Coordinator supporting distributed management processes

Field Study II: X_Workflow for overdraft management in a bank

Conclusion

Back Matter

Keywords

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Authors and Affiliations

Schalksmühle, Germany

Cutro, Italy

Bibliographic Information

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