InformationWeek

Playing By The Same Rules

With workflow moving to the enterprise, standards are needed. A vendor coalition is tackling the job

By Stephanie Stahl
Issue date: March 13, 1995

Workflow systems, for years limited to small workgroups, are beginning to spread through the enterprise. To hasten that move, a group of 100 vendors has banded together to create industrywide workflow standards. And they say this year will be pivotal to their efforts.

The Workflow Management Coalition was formed in August 1993 to hammer out standard applications programming interfaces (APIs) that they hope will solve workflow's interoperability problem before it becomes an overwhelming issue. "There's no doubt that standards will make our job easier," says David Baxter, president of Bear Tek Inc., a systems integrator in Kanata, Ontario. Without standards, Baxter adds, "the user loses out."

During the past year, workflow systems have become an important technology for helping users streamline their business processes. Sales of workflow systems and services are forecast to reach nearly $980 million this year, according to Delphi Consulting Group Inc., a Boston consulting firm. That's up from $725 million last year.

In fact, many people consider workflow and business process reengineering to be synonymous. But just as there are many business processes in an organization, there are many workflow tools to reengineer them. The chance of finding a single enterprisewide solution is slim.

So far, however, that hasn't bothered many users. "The investment in work flow has been made primarily at the workgroup level," explains Tom Koulopoulos, president of Delphi Consulting and a member of the coalition. "Every product has been fine-tuned to be the best of breed in a certain application."

Adds Baxter of Bear Tek: "Corporations are moving toward empowerment and local-level autonomy where business managers are held accountable for the bottom line. As a result, they make their own decisions about technology."

But as users rely more heavily on workflow systems, interoperability standards to allow for enterprisewide collaboration will become crucial. "Companies will eventually realize that some of their processes have tentacles that go outside particular workgroups," Koulopoulos says. "When there's a movement toward tying together all the different points, standards will become an absolutely essential component."

That's already true. In a 1994 survey, Delphi asked technology managers to list the areas where workflow systems needed to be improved. Nearly 30%-the single largest group-said standards.

Standards Consensus
Even companies such as STM Mortgage Co. in Dallas, which did find a particular workflow product useful throughout the organization, consider standards important. STM-which has an $800 million loan-origination business and a $6 billion loan-servicing operation--has implemented an advanced lending technology system based on Plexus FloWare software from Recognition International Inc., a workflow vendor in Dallas.

The system tracks and manages information tied to a loan application, performing many of the processing and routing tasks traditionally handled by clerks. With this system, loan application information is collected only once. It then makes its way through credit-checking and appraisal systems before going to an underwriter's desktop.

If the applicant is qualified, the software automatically draws up the appropriate documents for closing the loan. Tasks that used to take hours or days to complete now take minutes. "FloWare knows every step of the process and when the job is complete," says Brenda Jurgens, a consultant with Technology Enablers Inc. in Dallas, who helped build the workflow system for STM.

Even though proprietary software from Recognition helped STM meet its business objectives, standards are still necessary. "Mortgage companies acquire and sell loans all the time," explains Jurgens. "The ability to work with each other is important."

Creating workflow standards worldwide won't be easy, not by a long shot. For one, the Workflow Management Coalition, based in Brussels, Belgium, is composed of a variety of suppliers, including companies that sell document-management, imaging, and workflow systems. Among them are FileNet, Action Technologies, Lotus Development, and IBM. "This is a diverse group," says Shirish Hardikar, VP of marketing for Action Technologies Inc. in Alameda, Calif., and a coalition board member. "To have agreement on APIs is a major task."

The coalition's steering committee meets quarterly. In addition to Koulopoulos and Hardikar, other vendor members include Dave Shorter of IBM, the coalition's chairman, and technical committee chairman David Hollingsworth of ICL Ltd., a workflow supplier based in London.

The coalition has been hard at work for about a year and a half, and Hardikar expects to see results soon. "We're driving as quickly as possible toward completion and delivery," he says. Specifically, coalition members have several APIs under review, and many are confident that these will be finalized within months.

"This is not a single standards effort," says Koulopoulos. "There is a multitude of things that need to be done." Specifically, the coalition is working to develop workflow standards in five key areas: process definition, process interoperability, tool invocation, client worklist, and status and management.

For now, the group is focusing on the process definition and client worklist areas. These are the most important APIs, says Koulopoulos, and they have to b e standardized to provide basic levels of interoperability.

Process definition is the method used to map a process that the company wants to improve. "It's like a graphical tool that you use to draw out your business process," explains Koulopoulos. "The problem is every workflow product has its own set of icons, metaphors, and tools for creating the definition."

The workflow client API involves standardizing the worklist that individual employees receive on their desktops. It represents the task that has been routed to a user and the status of that task.

Insurance-claims processors, for instance, could click on their worklists and find out which claims they're responsible for that day, and where the claims should be routed to next."It's like having multiple electronic-mail systems on your desk," says Koulopoulos. "This standard would allow a single worklist to act as a presentation vehicle for work from any engine."

Vocabulary Needed
APIs that will be fleshed out later incl ude process interoperability, which will standardize the basic fields and structures used among workflow products; a standard for invoking applications that will make it possible for workflow systems in the enterprise to work with common desktop applications, such as word processing and databases; and a status and management API that will standardize the way workflow systems analyze real-time information.

Before the coalition can begin producing APIs, it has to come up with a standard vocabulary of workflow-related terms. It seemed that every vendor had a different meaning for even the most basic terms, including "process," "data," and "activity." To solve the issue of semantics, the group published a glossary last year.

The coalition's timing is right, says Amy Wohl, a consultant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. "There's a theory about standards that says you don't want to do things too soon or you run the risk of inhibiting growth of a young industry," Wohl says. "But workflow is getting to the stage where a few rules could be useful."

Not everyone is convinced. "There are so many variations of workflow that are tailored to the needs of an organization," says Michael Croxton, VP of marketing at Softlab Inc., a developer of process-management tools in Atlanta. "It's a tremen- dous cleansing exercise to look at the processes. If users have to adhere to a subset that has less than what they needed, then they may be at a disadvantage."

Even coalition member Richard Campione admits that customers of workflow systems are skeptical. Campione, manager of product marketing for ViewStar Corp., a workflow vendor in Alameda, Calif., says that while ViewStar is happy the standards effort is moving forward, customers are far less impressed. "Standards-making committees have a patchy success rate," he says. "Many customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude."

What the Workflow Management Coalition may need to reengineer next is the attitudes of some customers.

Illustration: David Bautista

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