A Workflow Change is a Workflow

Abstract

Organizations that are geared for success within today’s business environments must be capable of rapid and continuous change. This business reality is boosting the popularity of various types of workflow systems. However, current workflow systems are not yet capable of facing the ever-changing nature of their business environment. Part of the answer to the challenge, in our view, lies in change understanding, communication, implementation, and analysis. In this chapter, we present an overview of our work on modeling dynamic change within workflow systems. This work was recently completed by the introduction of ML−−DEWS, a Modeling Language to support Dynamic Evolution within workflow Systems. We firmly believe the thesis put forth in this chapter that a change is a process that can be modeled, enacted, analyzed, simulated and monitored as any process.