BPM Research History

From Office Automation to Workflow Management

A common misconception about workflow management is that the technology was developed during the heydays of the Business Process Reengineering wave, the early 1990s. In fact, workflow technology dates as far back as the mid-1970s. The first approaches towards the automation of business processes were part of the office automation prototypes at Xerox Parc (Officetalk, developed by Skip Ellis and Gary Nutt) and Wharton (SCOOP, developed by Michael Zisman). The focus of office automation research was “to reduce the complexity of the user’s interface to the [office information] system, control the flow of information, and enhance the overall efficiency of the office.” [Ellis, Nutt 1980, p. 28] The design of both systems started in the middle of the 1970s, but the idea of process automation through information technology can be traced back as far as 1968, when Fritz Nordsieck wrote:

“Think about [a] modern data processing [system]. [It] represents a perceptible process, that is [..] connected with the business process and accompanies – or even controls – this process during various segments.” [ Nordsieck 1972, col. 9].

Research in office automation, which flourished between 1975 and 1985, laid the groundwork for the development of industrial workflow applications through the analysis of technology support for administrative processes. While the research interest in office automation ceased by the middle of the 1980s [Mahling et al. 1995; Nutt 1996],

Figure 1 shows a selection of office automation and workflow prototypes on a timeline. Only few academic prototypes have had an impact on commercial systems: Xerox’ InConcert product benefitted from the in-house research, IABG ProMinanD was the result of an EU-sponsored research project, Domino (not to be confused with Lotus’ Groupware product) became Olivetti’s X_Workflow and the Melmac project at the University of Dortmund was commercialized in form of the short-lived LEU system.

Figure 1: History of Workflow Research (from zur Muehlen, M.: Workflow-based Process Controlling. Logos Publishers 2004)

With the reengineering wave of the early 1990s interest in process automation surged (as did federal research grants in this area), as the wave of research prototypes between 1993 and 2000 illustrates.

The commercial exploitation of workflow technology began between 1983 and 1985, fostered by advances in imaging and document management technology on the one side, and enhanced e-mail systems that extended traditional point-to-point mail routing with a predefined process map on the other side [Swenson, Irwin, 1995]. From this first generation of workflow systems, only few vendors like are still active, while the majority of the early players have been restructured through mergers and acquisitions, or dropped out of the market altogether. [zur Muehlen 2004, p. 76]. Figure 2 shows a history of commercial workflow systems.

Figure 1: History of Commercial Workflow Systems (from zur Muehlen, M.: Workflow-based Process Controlling. Logos Publishers 2004)

Taking both figures into account, we can identify that the research wave is lagging 10 years behind the commercial wave of systems.

References

• Ellis, C. A.; Nutt, G. J.: Office Information Systems and Computer Science. In: ACM Computing Surveys, 12 (1980) 1, pp. 27-60.
• Mahling, D. E.; Craven, N.; Croft, W. B.: From Office Automation to Intelligent Workflow Systems. In: IEEE Expert, 10 (1995) June, pp. 41-47.
• Nordsieck, F.: Betriebsorganisation. Lehre und Technik (Textband). 2nd revised and enhanced edition, Stuttgart 1972.
• Nutt, G. J.: The evolution toward flexible workflow systems. In: Distributed Systems Engineering, 3 (1996) 4, pp. 276-294.
• Swenson, K. D.; Irwin, K.: Workflow Technology: Tradeoffs for Business Process Reengineering. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS ’95). Milpitas (CA) 1995, pp. 22-29.
• zur Muehlen, M.: Workflow-based Process Controlling. Foundation, Design, and Application of workflow-driven Process Information Systems. Logos, Berlin 2004.