My friends at Canon USA interviewed me a while ago for their strategic planning group. They cut the footage and mixed it with some other interviews for a large management meeting and were kind enough to send me a DVD of the whole thing - thank you! The questions were wide open - how will work evolve over the next 25-50 years etc., so here is my attempt at futurecasting….

The automation of business processes requires the specification of process structures as well as the definition of organizational resources involved in these processes. While the modeling of business processes and workflows is well researched, the link between the organizational building blocks and process activities is less well understood, and current developments in the web services choreography area completely neglect the organizational aspect of workflow applications. The purpose of the paper is to give an overview of the organizational aspects of workflow technology in the context of the workflow life cycle, to provide a review of existing work, and to develop guidelines for the design of a workflow-enabled organization, which can be used by both workflow vendors and users…

• zur Muehlen, Michael: Organizational Management in Workflow Applications. Information Technology and Management Journal. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 5 (2004) 3-4, July - October, pp. 271-291.

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.