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to evaluate the cohesion of activities in existing workfl ow design which are considered by
their owners as 'well-designed'. This could result in an accumulation of empirical metrics
scores on cohesive activities. These particular scores could then be used as a sort of 'stop
criterion' when generating alternative workfl ow designs: As soon as all activities satisfy a
minimal, empirically determined quality score, the search for yet more alternatives could be
terminated. The gathering of these empirical data and experimentation with such a quality
score must point out whether this approach suffi ciently prunes the search tree for alternative
workfl ow designs, which grows exponentially in the number of available operations.
Finally, we would like to extend the cohesion metric as described with notions for
the 'coupling' degree between several activities. In software engineering, this is another
important construct. It gives an indication how modules or classes incorporate a sense of
mutual independence. The higher the exchange of calls and information exchange between
modules or classes, the lower their independence. Clearly, the notions of coupling and co-
hesion are related to some level. We suspect that the translation of the concept of coupling
to workfl ow processes may be less straightforward than it was the case for cohesion. After
all, the drawbacks of highly dependent activities seem less severe than tightly coupled
software modules.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Eric Verbeek of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
for his assistance in preparing and carrying out the web-based survey. The author is also
indebted to all consultant respondents.
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