Multi-channel provisioning of public services - Department of ...

Business modelling and process support
2004). Alternatives to the activity centred classification includes process centred, where
the processes present the state changes of the process object; and resource centred
where the process is represented as a network of processing stations that interact with
each other (zur Muehlen and Indulska, 2010). Examples of process languages include
ADEPT flex , BPMN, and EPC (graph-based); and YAWL, Petri-nets, and flow nets (netbased)
(zur Muehlen and Indulska, 2010).
3.2 Service and process-oriented operations support
The previous section established an understanding of the use of conceptual models both
as a representation of different aspects of work and in the possible automation of work
activities. This section considers the historical element of workflow systems and up to
current approaches to PAIS.
Workflow and workflow management systems are a terms mainly belonging to the
1990s, which later have evolved into the BPM domain. The WfMC defined workflow
as:
The automation of a business process, in whole or part during which documents,
information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for actions,
according to a set of procedural rules.
Lawrence (1997)
A workflow management system (WFMS) is defined as:
A system that defines, creates and manages the execution of workflows through
the use of software, running on one or more workflow engines, which is able to
interpret the process definition, interact with workflow participants and, where
required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications.
Lawrence (1997)
Figure 7 shows relationship among important concepts defined by the WfMC. It shows
that the workflow management system is case-driven, handling separate process
instances based on a process definition comprised by manual and automatic activities,
which have equivalent activity instances within the process instance. Manual activities
are performed by human actors, while automatic activities are executed through
invoking software compoments within the information infrastructure.
In extending the workflow concept towards BPM and current approaches, the weakness
of the WFMS approach is a missing support for overall business process control and
monitoring. As long as this support is not provided, the automation of specific functions
of enterprises will not provide productivity gains (Lu and Sadiq, 2007). BPM attempts
to address this, and provides a structured, coherent, and consistent way of
understanding, documenting, modelling, analysing, simulating, executing, and
continuously changing end-to-end business processes and all resources involved in light
of their contribution to business performance (Recker et al., 2006). BPM can be defined
as …
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