What are Workflow and Business Process Management?

Workflow management (also called Business Process Management) is, in the largest sense, the coordination of work processes through software. A workflow management system routes pending activities to process participants according to a model of the process. Workflow management systems have been around since the late 1970s, but every now and then they are rediscovered in a marketing wave such as Office Automation, Business Process Reengineering, or Web Services Choreography.

Workflow and BPM are typical Information Systems topics, since they operate at the intersection of the business side and the technology side of an organization. While organizations can benefit immensely from a properly aligned solution, failing to match the available workflow technology with the organization’s culture and the properties of its business processes can have strong counter-productive effects. Process management technology is a typical back-end solution, which is often embedded in middleware such as application servers or enterprise resource planning systems.

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