Implementing support for work activity coordination within a distributed workflow system

There is growing interest in providing computer support for an organisation's business processes such as customer order processing, product support, stock taking and so forth. Workflow systems are normally used for this purpose to co-ordinate and monitor execution of multiple tasks arranged to form business processes. In this context, computer support for work activity co-ordination will be taken to mean tools and services made available to the employees of an organisation to enable them to carry out their tasks that form the part of these workflows. The paper illustrates how a transactional workflow system can be augmented with support for reliable management of worklists in an arbitrarily distributed environment. Ideally, the workflow enactment service should be neutral to the types of work activity coordination services to be made available to users. In this way, the needs of a wide variety of organisations can be supported by building organisation specific services. The approach taken here is to separate organisational aspects of workflow management from the workflow enactment service as much as possible.