Methods, tools and technologies for Coordination and Workflow Management
Dr. Frank von Martial
T-Mobil
Bonn
Germany
Objective
Information systems play a very important role in supporting the functionality
of medium to large organizations. However, the 21st century organization
will be very different from the traditional structure. The organization
will be organized around processes, not tasks. Teams, not individuals,
will be the focus of organization performance and design. Customer needs
will shape business units. In the context of engineering innovative organizational
structures, coordination and workflow management technology play an important
role.
This tutorial introduces coordination and workflow management technology. Coordination technology is both viewed from an organizational and a software engineering point of view. It defines the state-of-the-art of these technologies and outlines its future challenges. Besides workflow management other techniques for coordination will be presented such as groupware, agent modelling, process design, planning, communication and conflict management. Some questions dealt with are: How can the workflow in an customer oriented organization be modelled? Where is a need for coordination technology in designing and managing modern organizations? What is the role of information technology for reengineering organizations? What is different in a workflow management project in comparison to a standard software engineering project? What are CSFs in exploiting the potential of workflow managements systems? What do workflow products offer and where remains research work to do? In addition, the lecturer will present examples of workflow management and business process reengineering projects, also including his own experience in that domain.
Table of Contents:
Coordination and workflow management
- issues
- coordination approaches
- work structure vs. coordination
technology
- comparison to other concepts:
CIP, TQM, change management, Kaizen, JIT etc.
Coordination by process/workflow management
- functional vs. process-oriented
organization
- guidelines for process
(re-)design
Workflow management (WFM) and organization reengineering projects
- selecting the focus in
a WFM-project
- managing a WFM-project
- teams and roles in WFM
projects
- examples of WFM projects
- roles in WFM project
- phases of a WFM project
- critical success factors
of WFM projects
Software development methodologies for WFM projects
- logical design, implementation
architecture, languages, OO-techniques etc.
Workflow Management Coalition
- mission, Workflow Reference
Model, system architecture
Business process reengineering and workflow management
- what is BPR, workflow
vs. business process
- reengineering IT,
IT and BPR
Products and tools for workflow management
Other coordination techniques: groupware tools, coordination by planning, coordination by conflict management, coordination by communication and negotiation, AI-techniques
Future trends and research issues in coordination and workflow management
Summary
About the instructor
Frank von Martial is an information systems manager and consultant for organizational issues at T-Mobil, a German mobile net carrier and service provider. He is responsible for IT projects in the domains customer care, sales, marketing and billling. He was also project leader of a BPR project. Result of this project was the implementation of a new customer care unit with 750 employees.
In former times he worked as a researcher at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) in Germany and at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) in Japan. He has published more than 30 papers and books. One of his books is entitled "Coordinating Plans of Autonomous Agents", published by Springer LNAI. He has delivered many speaches at international conferences and given several tutorials in the field of information management.