Any activity executed within an organization, requiring the coordinated execution of simple atomic activities (task) by executing agents. A business process is described by a workflow.
Published in Chapter:
Workflow Management Systems for Healthcare Processes
C. Combi (Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy) and G. Pozzi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 5
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-889-5.ch177
Abstract
Organizations achieve their goals by executing processes, which can be physical processes to produce goods (e.g., assembling components of a PC), information processes to manage information (e.g., to collect information about facts), or business processes (e.g., to produce goods, to provide services, and to manage information). Final goals are achieved by executing atomic work units (tasks), by coordinating them, by assigning them to executors (agents) that can be human or automatic ones. A workflow management system (WfMS) is a software system that supports the execution of such processes inside organizations. A WfMS requires a formal description, known as schema or process model or workflow, for every process it has to manage: many instances (or cases) of a process can be executed at the same time, sharing the same schema, while each case has its specific data, like patient’s name, insurance claim, and so on.