Based on the results of the study carried out in 1996 to investigate the state of the art of workflow and process technology, MCC initiated the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) research project to develop innovative agent-based process technology that can support the process requirements of dynamically-changing organizations and the requirements of nomadic computing. With a research focus on the flow of interaction among people and software agents representing people, the project deliverables will include a scalable, heterogeneous, ubiquitous and nomadic infrastructure for business processes. The resulting technology is being tested in applications that stress an intensive mobile collaboration among people as part of large, evolving business processes. This text provides an overview of the problems and issues related to process and workflow technology, and in particular to definition and analysis of processes and workflows, and execution of their instances. The need for a transactional workflow model is discussed and a spectrum of related transaction models is covered in detail. A plethora of influential projects in workflow and process automation is summarized.The projects are drawn from both academia and industry. The monograph also provides a short overview of the most popular workflow management products, and the state of the workflow industry in general. The book offers a guide through the shortcomings of existing solutions of process improvement by people with daily first-hand experience, and is suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level courses on workflow and process automation, and as a reference for practitioners in industry.
