Service Composition - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 213

• It may contain a series of automated activities and/or manual activi-
ties. Activities may be large and complex, involving the flow of
materials, information, and business commitments.
• It exhibits a very dynamic nature, so it can respond to demands from
customers and to changing market conditions.
• It is widely distributed and customized across boundaries within
and between organizations, often spanning multiple applications
with very different technology platforms.
• It is usually long running—a single instance of a process such as
order to cash may run for months or even years.
Every business process implies processing: a series of activities (processing
steps) leading to some form of transformation of data or products for which
the process exists. Transformations may be executed manually or in an auto-
mated way. A transformation will encompass multiple processing steps.
Finally, every process delivers a product, like a mortgage or an authorized
invoice. The extent to which the end product of a process can be specified in
advance and can be standardized impacts the way that processes and their
workflows can be structured and automated.
Processes have decision points. Decisions have to be made with regard to
routing and allocation of processing capacity. In a highly predictable and
standardized environment, the trajectory in the process of a customer order
will be established in advance in a standard way. Only if the process is com-
plex and if the conditions of the process are not predictable will routing
decisions have to be made on the spot. In general, the customer orders will
be split into a category that is highly proceduralized (and thus automated)
and a category that is complex and uncertain. Here, human experts will be
needed, and manual processing is a key element of the process.
10.2 Workflow
A workflow system automates a business process, in whole or in part, dur-
ing which documents, information, or tasks are passed from one participant
to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Workflows are
based on document life cycles and form-based information processing, so
generally they support well-defined, static, clerical processes. They provide
transparency, since business processes are clearly articulated in the soft-
ware, and they are agile because they produce definitions that are fast to
deploy and change.
A workflow can be defined as the sequence of processing steps (execution of
business operations, tasks, and transactions), during which information and