Formulating the Data-Flow Perspective for Business Process Management
Sherry X. Sun, J. Leon Zhao, Jay F. Nunamaker, Olivia R. Liu Sheng
Information Systems Research · 2006 · Volume 17 · Issue 4
Abstract
Workflow technology has become a standard solution for managing increasingly complex business processes. Successful business process management depends on effective workflow modeling and analysis. One of the important aspects of workflow analysis is the data-flow perspective because, given a syntactically correct process sequence, errors can still occur during workflow execution due to incorrect data-flow specifications. However, there have been only scant treatments of the data-flow perspective in the literature and no formal methodologies are available for systematically discovering data-flow errors in a workflow model. As an indication of this research gap, existing commercial workflow management systems do not provide tools for data-flow analysis at design time. In this paper, we provide a data-flow perspective for detecting data-flow anomalies such as missing data, redundant data, and potential data conflicts. Our data-flow framework includes two basic components: data-flow specification and data-flow analysis; these components add more analytical rigor to business process management.
Keywords
workflow modeling, data-flow specification, data-flow anomalies, data-flow verification, dependency analysis, process data diagram
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