It is the role of a workflow designer to analyze a business process in order to determine and specify the workflow process contained within it.
When analyzing a business process, the following considerations should be made:
- Identify the intrinsic steps to the business process
- These are the steps that are mandatory for the business
process to succeed. If the workflow is to contain these steps, then
additional considerations must be taken into account as described
below.
- Consider data integrity and traceability
- Data passed through the workflow needs to be kept intact and
there needs to be traceability for that data, i.e., the ability to
determine how the data has changed as it has moved through the
workflow. This may include the traceability of data through other
integrated systems.
- Determine if there are alternative ways to complete intrinsic steps that fail
- It is very important to determine if there are alternative
ways to complete any intrinsic steps that fail, either manual, or
through some other automatic work around. If there is no way to
complete an intrinsic step, should it fail, then it should not be
included in the workflow.
- Determine the steps in the business process likely to be altered
- Steps likely to be altered in a business process are potential
candidates for the workflow. The workflow is an easily configurable
mechanism for handling activities. Whenever the steps in the
business process need to be changed, the activities can be
re-ordered or removed as necessary.
- Identify non divisible tasks
- There may be two or more steps in a business process which
cannot be divided. For example, part of a business process might
involve writing a person's social security number to one system and
his or her salary details on different tables. These may be seen as
two steps in the business process; however, they are non divisible
tasks, i.e., one is invalid without the other. Non divisible tasks
should not be in a workflow unless they can be combined into one
activity.
- Determine if step involves a notification
- A notification may be added to any activity type in a workflow
process definition. The notification will be delivered when the
activity is executed by the workflow engine.
- Determine if step involves a piece of work to be carried out by a user
- A manual activity must be created for work that is carried out
by a user.
- Identify Data Required
- This includes the type of data required and what it is used
for.
Once these considerations have been taken into account, the workflow designer should be ready to design the workflow for the business process.