以流程觀為基礎之工作流程管理: 虛擬流程之模式與應用

Abstract

Workflow technology automates business processes to increase managerial efficiency. Given the diverse requirements of the participants involved in a business process, providing various participants with adequate process information is critical to effective workflow management. This work describes a novel process-view, i.e., an abstracted process which is derived from a base process to provide process abstraction, for modeling a virtual workflow process. The proposed process-view model enhances the conventional activity-based process models by providing different participants with various views of a process. Moreover, this work presents a novel order-preserving approach to derive a process-view from a base process. This approach can preserve the original ordering of activities in the base process. Additionally, a role-based approach is proposed to assist the discovery of process-views. The relationships among tasks, organizational roles and workflow operations, as specified in role-based access control systems, are used to evaluate the degrees of relevance between roles and tasks. Next, a novel algorithm is proposed to generate automatically role-relevant process-views based on degrees of relevance. Finally, process-view model is also applied to coordinate interorganizational workflows. An enterprise can design various process-views for different partners based on diverse commercial relationships and, in doing so, establish an integrated process that consists of private processes and process-views that each partner provides. Participatory enterprises can obtain appropriate progress information from their own integrated processes, allowing them to collaborate effectively. Process-view model increases the flexibility and functionality of current workflow management systems.