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Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview
Workflow management helps you manage and control your business processes,
pinpoint areas for improvement, and streamline your procedures for speedier cycles
and shorter response times. By defining the flow of work, everyone is notified of
outstanding work and presented with the required information and an appropriate
application to perform the task.
1.1 Basic Concepts of FlowMark
FlowMark is a tool to help you automate and streamline your business processes.
This is critical for success in today's business environment. FlowMark was written
as a pure application-independent workflow engine which manages the flow of work
throughout your organization. It does not have roots in forms, document or image
workflow as some other products do. FlowMark helps you harness the power of
other applications to handle individual tasks. You decide which applications are
best suited to assist you in performing these individual tasks.
FlowMark is designed to handle the flow of work from user to user, following the
business rules specified in your business process. Users have a work list (or
perhaps more than one) where activities are placed automatically when the flow
through a “process instance” determines there is something for them to do. The
users select the next item they wish to work on from the list, and FlowMark calls
the appropriate application program (defined in the process design) to perform that
task. Often it is an application the users already understand. They can work in the
application as long as needed to complete the task. When the program returns to
FlowMark, the server is notified, and navigation continues through the process to
the next activity or activities to be done. These then appear on the work lists of the
people responsible for completing them.
While FlowMark has a user-oriented view, it is also able to include in the process
flow both automatically started activities, that start immediately on a single user's
desktop, and what are called “unattended” activities. These are batch jobs that
expect no user interaction and are started automatically. Some process designs
achieve the same function by assigning an activity to a specific user, specifying that
it start automatically. The program is implemented so that it executes without any
user interaction.
1.2 FlowMark Buildtime: Defining Your Processes
“Buildtime” is the definition facility of FlowMark. This is where you define your
processes and their hierarchies, assign programs to activities, and allocate staff
such as people or roles. The following definition facilities are provided:
The Process Definition facility is where you specify and maintain process
models as activity networks. These can involve multiple steps and many users.
The creation and manipulation of activity networks is done with a graphical
interface. An activity network can be considered to be a directed graph, where
the nodes represent activities to be performed and the connectors between the
nodes represent either control flow or data flow. The control flows can be
unconditional or conditional. If conditional, then a Boolean expression is
associated with the connector.
Copyright IBM Corp. 1996, 1998 1