Essential Principles for Workflow Modelling Effectiveness

While the specification languages of workflow management systems focus on process execution semantics, the successful development of workflows relies on a fuller conceptualisation of business processing, including process semantics. Traditionally, the success of conceptual modelling techniques has depended largely on the adequacy of certain requirements: conceptualisation (following the Conceptualisation Principle), expressive power (following the One Hundred Principle), comprehensibility and formal foundation. An equally important requirement, particularly with the increased conceptualisation of business aspects, is business suitability. In this paper, the focus is on the suitability of workflow modelling for a commonly encountered class of (operational) business processing, e.g. those of insurance claims, bank loans and land conveyancing. Based on a previously conducted assessment of a number of integrated techniques, the results of which are summarised in this paper, five business suitability principles are proposed: organisational embedding, scenario validation, service information hiding, cognitive sufficiency and execution resilience. As a result, a further insight into workflow specifications and workflow deployment in open distributed architectures is claimed.