workflow, a brief overview
Post on 19-Jul-2015
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What’s the problem?
• Making people and processes work together can besupported by a large variety of solutions.
• Choosing the right (ecosystem of) solutions is vital, but can be tricky
• This presentation gives an overview of “workflow” and some guidance how to make the right choice
Workflow comes in many forms
• Level of control
• Who is participating in what role?
• Basic concepts
• Undoing work
• Managing the workload
Level of control
Decentralized control (choreography):• Ad hoc connected points
• Non standardized message queueing
• Standardized message queueing
Centralized control:• Centralized message transfer (Broker / Bus)
• Process orchestration / transactionmanagement
• Business Process management
loose
tight
Choreography vs orchestration
Choreography:• None of the participating parties have
control, nor visibility of all processes and work
• So each party can only control it’s own processes and work
Orchestration:
• One (1) controller that has visibility of all processes and work
• Processes and work is controlled by a this controller
Business process management (BPM)
BPM goes much further than workflow…
• It enables the understanding, automation, and optimization of business processes.
Two basic concepts:Sequential and State machine workflows
Sequential workflow:• Nearly linear execution: activities
are execute in a predetermined order and are not revisited (except of looping activities).
• Compare to a flowchart without GOTO.
State machine workflow:• Work starts in one state, traversed
through other states and end in an end state
• States may be revisited.• Compare to a flowchart with
GOTO.
Who is involved?
• Are humans involved or only automatedprocesses
• Who is responsible / accountable / supports / consulted / informed (RASCI)?
• Are there any external influences? • Events
• Is the workflow part of any external workflows?
Exception managementHow does the workflow cope with exceptions?
Always: audit the workflow: keep track of messages, process states, errorevents
And if things go wrong… try to recover:
Atomic transactions (when all resources are controlled centrally):• Rollback all actions to the exact state as when the transaction started• Forces locking of distributed resources• Deadlockfree protocol needed
Long running / distributed transactions (when resources cannot be controlledcentrally):
• Distributed resources cannot be locked easily• Compensating actions needed for undoing work
Designing the workflow
• Static or dynamic: can work(proces) flows be dynamically updated?
• Can the business rules be maintained easily?
o By a user friendly editor
o By ICT specialists, business specialists or regularend users.
How to cope with migration?
Scenario:
• Multiple versions of workflows running at the sametime
• You need to implement a new version of your workflow
Questions you should be asking:
• How to migrate running workflows? Stop or continue running?
• Make available the new version of your workflow or keep supporting older versions?
Workload management
To keep your workflow running:
• Monitor workload continuously
• Implement throttling: limit workloadprocessing
• Up- and outscale workflow processing
Estimate expected workflow beforehand!
Always keep in mind
• Reduce complexity
• Using a minimal platform configuration
• Be flexible to manage any type of required process
• Be open to integrate with other platforms easily
• Be robust enough to scale to large workloads.
bHans M.R. van Rijs
ict solution architect / platform specialist
mail: hansrontheweb@live.com
weblogs:
http://webloghansr.blogspot.com
http://hansronarchitecture.blogspot.nl
http://praktischsharepoint.blogspot.nl/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hansrontheweb
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansvanrijs
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