Workflow

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Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. More specifically, workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is considered in Workflow, Workflow considers "throughput" as a distinct measure. Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using Petri nets.

While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging software.

Distinction can be made between "scientific" and "business" workflow paradigms. While the former is mostly concerned with throughput of data through various algorithms, applications and services, the latter concentrates on scheduling task executions, including dependencies which are not necessarily data-driven and may include human agents.

Scientific workflows found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, where they successfully met the need for multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research organizations, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.

Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software application server and organizing a paper or electronic document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 1970s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure systems.

As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast different workflow engines across both of these domains.

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Workflow systems

Workflow diagram systems are defined as "systems that help organizations to specify, execute, monitor, and coordinate the flow of work cases within a distributed office environment". Workflow diagrams rely on the use of standardized graphical notations to describe workflow structures. The Business Process Modeling Notation is an example for these graphical notations.

The system contains two basic components: first component is the workflow modeling component (sometimes called the specification module or the build time system), which enables administrations and analysts to define process and activities, analyze and simulate them, and assign them to people. The second component is the workflow execution component, sometimes called the run-time system. The run-time system most often consists of an execution interface seen by end-users and a workflow engine. The workflow engine is an execution environment which assists or performs the coordination of processes and activities.

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es:Flujo de trabajo fr:Workflow pl:Workflow pt:Workflow zh-cn:工作流技术

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