Human Workflows via Document-Driven Process Choreography

Abstract

Workflows are ubiquitous in enterprise applications from manufacturing industry to healthcare industry. A human workflow is a dynamic set of tasks performed by human participants to reach a shared goal. Commitments among participants can be used to model the workflow and coordinate their execution of it. These commitments can be captured by role-based orchestrations in a Microsoft workflow implementation with Microsoft BizTalk server (BizTalk). BizTalk provides tools and methodologies to compose these orchestrations that can be executed as business processes and monitored by Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) dashboards. In this paper, we present methodologies to develop a human workflow by using role-based BizTalk orchestrations to capture commitments extracted from a process- centric workflow definition. In addition, we discuss the life- cycle management of a human workflow with an emphasis on process design and monitoring.