Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems (Cooperative...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 384 pages
• Published by: The MIT Press March 1, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0262720469
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0262720465
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1.1 pounds

Product Description
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 human being 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.

Book Info
Offers a comprehensive introduction to workflow management, the management of business processes with information technology. Includes a chapter of case studies and review exercises. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems (Cooperative Information Systems) (Hardcover) This book has significantly changed my thinking about and approach to workflow management. Prior to reading it I based workflow systems on process chains based on frameworks such as entry-task-validation-exit (ETVX) or plan-do-check-act (PDCA). While process chains are a valid approach, the only level of formality I imposed was cost and value analysis, which I realized after reading this book was not the entire picture of a workflow. What I learned is how to view workflow as a logical network using Perti Nets, which are both graphical and based on a formal language using Boolean logic (AND and OR joins and splits), programmatic views (iteration) and analytical logic (causality). More importantly, this approach has resolved a misalignment between the design of workflow systems with which I previously used procedures and events and the development approach used by my company's software engineers who were using object-oriented methods. Petri Nets are based on states instead of events, which more naturally aligns object-oriented development of workflow systems to the underlying design. Discovering this is what so significantly changed my thinking and approach to workflow. Although this book is heavily slanted towards Perti Nets, it also contains a wealth of material about workflow from business process and operations perspectives, and does not obviate process chain approaches. Instead, it provides you with a good grounding in the basics of workflow in general, and provides you with tools, techniques and an approach to developing workflows in a formal manner. If you are involved in process design, workflow development or business process engineering/reengineering this book is an invaluable, thought-provoking resource.