Formal workflow design analytics using data flow modeling

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Workflow design Data dependency Activity dependency Activity relations Business process automation Workflow design has become a critical function in enterprise information management. However, only scant research attention has been paid to formal workflow design methodologies. As a result, existing design methods in business process management remain a manual and experiential effort and result in inefficiency in design tasks and potential errors in workflow models. Considering that there are hundreds and thousands of business processes in organizations worldwide, overcoming this deficiency will have an enormous technical and economic impact on enterprise information management. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of incorporating formal analytics into workflow design, thus alleviating the intellectual challenge faced by business analysts when creating workflow models. The workflow design analytics we propose helps construct a workflow model based on information about the relevant activities and their associated data. In addition, our workflow design approach also helps determine whether the given information is sufficient for generating a workflow model and ensures the avoidance of certain workflow anomalies. The significance of our study is to enable the transformation of workflow design from a manual and experiential effort into a more systematic and rigorous approach. Over the last decade during the drive towards e-business, many organizations have realized the importance of Internet-based business process automation as they face the challenge of obtaining competitiveness in the global marketplace. To achieve high levels of business process efficiency , many organizations resort to workflow management systems to integrate business activities that span multiple functional units, such as human resources, marketing, and manufacturing [31,33]. As a prerequisite for effective workflow management, a workflow model is required to specify the execution sequence of activities needed to support certain business functions, such as producing a product or offering a service. Thus, it is critical to design correct workflow models efficiently according to specific business requirements. The existing workflow design approaches, such as the participative approach widely used in practice, mainly focus on collecting business requirements rather than providing a rigorous procedure for generating workflow models. The lack of formal design approaches often causes design problems. Recent empirical studies have shown an error rate of 10%–20% from over 2000 process models used in different industry practice , which include the widely used SAP reference model, the models used in a process reengineering project in the …