Издательство Springer, 1998, -219 pp.As the business environment has become more and more turbulent over the past decade, information technology risks becoming an impediment rather than a motor of progress.
The challenge to computer science is to find a way of dealing with rapid, continuous change by developing novel interrelated information and communication technologies, and aligning them with both the social needs of cooperating user groups and the management requirements of formal organisations.
Workflow systems are among the most well known technologies addressing this trend, but they mean different things to different people.
Computer scientists understand workflows as a way to extract control from application programs, thus making them more flexible. Bureaucratic organisations (and most commercial programs) perceive them as supporting a linear or branching flow of documents from one workplace to another - the next try after the failure of office automation.
This book takes another perspective, that of the modem customer-driven and groupwork-oriented process organisation. Extending the language-action perspective from the CSC W field, its customer-oriented view of workflows enables novel kinds of business process analysis, and leads to interesting new combinations of information and cooperation technologies. Schael's empirical studies show some of the pitfalls resulting from a naive use of these technologies, and exemplify ways to get around these pitfalls.
The development and evolution of such cooperative information systems requires not just technological innovations but also interdisciplinary cooperation and - most importantly - empirical validation in practice. The genesis of this book is an excellent example. While its empirical results stem from practical experience in the service indusfries, its scientific roots (represented by the undersigned as cosupervisors of the underlying doctoral thesis at Aachen University of Technology) comprise information systems in computer science, social and formal aspects of computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interfaces in engineering applications of informatics. Moreover, this research is a good new example of a truly European cooperation. The practical experience was acquired in Italy, while the doctoral thesis was prepared for a German university.
All of us have learned a lot during this exercise, and the enormous success of the first edition of this book shows the great international interest for the topic and the results. A French edition appeared last year and met with equal interest.Introduction
From the Functional to the Process-Centred Organisation
Analysis and Design of Cooperative Networks
Workflow Management Technology
Field Study 1: The Coordinator Supporting Distributed Management Processes in a Training Company
Field Study 2: X_Workflow for Overdraft Management in a Bank
Conclusion
