Beyond workflow management

Abstract

In the last decade, workflow technology has become one of the building blocks for realizing enterprise information systems. Unfortunately, the application of contemporary workflow management systems is limited to well-defined and well-controlled environments. In practice, workflow technology often fails because of limited flexibility. We advocate a paradigm shift to overcome this problem: Workflows should not be driven by pre-specified control-flows but by the products they generate. This paper presents the software package FLOWer which fully supports this paradigm shift.