Applying a Generic Conceptual Workflow Modeling Technique to Document Workflows

The workflow technology is emerging as an appropriate platform for the automated coordination of business activities. The documents represent the primary medium of business communication. Almost all kinds of business activities have some associated documents. The workflow management systems could be applied to coordinate the flow of business documents. However, before this automated document workflows could be implemented, we need to apply some conceptual mode-ling methodology to capture, analyse, and describe the role and flow of documents in a business process. In this paper, we present a generic conceptual workflow modeling technique that should be applicable to all kinds of workflows. The document workflows represent a specialized application of workflows. We identify basic characteristics of document workflows and discuss some issues that should be targeted during the modeling process. We also apply the proposed conceptual modeling technique to model an example document workflows application for handling postgraduate admission process of a university.