Definitions of "Workflow"

For more general workflow discussion see WorkflowLinks, or WorkFlow for myGrid project specific information.

Some people distinguish between workflow and more general business process systems, based on early workflow systems that were centred on document management, work item routing and modelling the flow of work and human responsibility. However, with the increasing use of workflow to describe business and application integration, including web service orchestration, this distinction is blurring. For example see Business processes and workflow in the Web services world

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia Workflow entry may not have the most quotable definition "Workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: ..." but it does have a useful list of external links.

Workflow Management Coalition

From WfMC

Workflow "The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents,information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules."

page 8 in Workflow Management Coalition Terminology and Glossary WFMC-TC-1011 http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/TC-1011_term_glossary_v3.pdf

Workflow "The computerised facilitation or automation of a business process, in whole or part."

page 6 in WfMC Workflow Reference Model TC00-1003 http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/tc003v11.pdf

Grid perspective

Workflow is a critical element of any Grid for it covers the capability of linking different services together to produce new more complex services. In spite of or perhaps because of its ubiquity there is surprising little consensus as to the “right way” to implement workflow. In fact even the name is not so obvious with alternatives being “Service Orchestration”, “Service or Process Coordination”, “Service Conversation”, “Web or Grid Scripting”, “Application Integration”, “Software Bus” or perhaps best “Web or Grid Programming”. The different names reflect the different sources of work in this area and we are not aware of any comprehensive review of this important field;

section 7.4 UK e-Science Gap Analysis http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2003-01/index.html

A later section (8.4) discusses the relationship between workflow on the Grid and the more business-orineted view of the WfMC.

Dictionary.com

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=workflow&r=67

1. The scheduling of independent jobs on a computer. (See also time-sharing, WFL.)
2. The set of relationships between all the activities in a project, from start to finish. Activities are related by different types of trigger relation. Activities may be triggered by external events or by other activities.
3. The movement of documents around an organisation for purposes including sign-off, evaluation, performing activities in a process and co-writing.

[Stef Joosten et.al. "An empirical study about the practice of workflow management", WA-12 report, 1994].

(1995-03-27) Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2004 Denis Howe

Earliest?

WFL - Work Flow Language. Burroughs, ca 1973. A job control language for the B6700/B7700 under MCP. WFL was a compiled block-structured language similar to ALGOL 60, with subroutines and nested begin-end's.

["Work Flow Management User's Guide", Burroughs Manual 5000714, 1973].

["Burroughs B6700/B7700 Work Flow Language", R.M. Cowan in "Command Languages", C. Unger ed, N-H 1975].

from http://computing-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/WFL

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-- MarkGreenwood - 19 Oct 2004