Integrating Activity- and Goal-Based Workflows: A Data Model Based Design Method

Abstract

Data-centric approaches are very promising. The inference of business processes from the structure of data provides more flexibility than the activity-based approaches which enforce a specific flow of behavior. However, the price for this flexibility is the lack of a standard organizational behavior. Actually, there is a tension between the standardization of workers’ behavior and allowing them to deal with unexpected situations by using their own tacit knowledge. The blended workflow approach [1] integrates activity-based with goal-based representations of a workflow to balance these two aspects. In this paper we describe how to design two workflow models, an activity-based and a goal-based, from a common data-model. The overall approach consists on a stepwise generation of models departing from an annotated data model where an intermediate state model is used to define the set of conditions that both workflow models, activity and goal, have to support.