工作流管理系统的作用

来源：http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=Workflow 

 

工作流管理系统(WFMS)可以使用在以下三个场景下：

         1. 作为EAI(EnterPrise Application Integration)的基础;

         2. 工作流软件

         3. 作为组件嵌入Application

详细如下：

Target usage

One option is to use a WFMS as an enterprise application integration (EAI) platform. Currently, in most enterprise environments, the IT infrastructure has various heterogeneous applications and databases running in an intranet. Typically, these applications have a clear purpose when they are introduced in the organization. Examples are customer management, document management, supply chain, order entry, billing, resource planning... Let's call them dedicated applications. Each of these dedicated applications contain knowledge about the business processes they have to support. The enterprise fits these automated processes of the software components into their overall non-automated business processes. Once such dedicated applications are installed and running, opportunities arise for new feature requirements that span over multiple applications. Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the discipline of implementing software requirements that involve multiple dedicated applications. Sometimes this is only data exchange that requires the implementation of a communication channel between two applications. Dedicated applications incorporate a number of business processes hard coded in the software. You could say that you buy a set of fixed, automated business processes. A WFMS on the other hand has got no prior knowledge of the domain. A WFMS takes a description of a business process as input and manages the executions of the process instances. That makes it much more flexible then dedicated applications but you have to do the effort to create a formal description of the business process. That is why WFMS and dedicated applications are complementary. A WFMS can be used to manage the overall process. As a rule of thumb, you could say use a dedicated application if it supports the processes you need. The first way to use a WFMS that was discussed here is to tie together all dedicated applications and create an EAI-platform with it.

A second option where a WFMS delivers high added value is for the development of workflow software that has a lot of people-related tasks. For this purpose, most WFMSs have a very convenient mechanism of creating forms for tasks. This target usage is especially productive in organizations focussing on ISO or CMM certification. Instead of documenting the procedures in a text format, a WFMS allows you to create automated support (e.g. by means of a web-application) of the procedures that are modelled as process definitions.

The third option is to embed a workflow engine inside another application. Remember from the first option that dedicated application incorporate a set of fixed business processes for a specific domain. The companies that develop the dedicated applications, can embed workflow engine software inside of their software. The workflow engine is in this case only used as an application component, hiding it from the application users. The main reason for embedding a workflow engine inside an application is for reuse (not reinventing wheels & hot water) and maintainability of the application software.