Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Workflows and Workflow Management Systems

Information technology is seen as a means by which a business can achieve agility and competitiveness. Although information technology has numerous beneficial effects on a typical enterprise, perhaps the most potent means of applying information technology is to use it to directly manage business processes through workflow management systems.

A workflow management system provides the business analyst with a view of the processes that the business currently operates, and allows the analyst to manage those processes according to the enterprise's business direction and changing market conditions. Under the covers, the workflow system is a dependable (and usually distributed) computing system that ensures ...