工作流技术在办公自动化系统内得到了广泛的应用,却面临业务流程的多样性和易变性等应用难点。针对这一问题,发现办公自动化系统中的流程多样性和易变性的主要原因在于不同人员、不同部门之间的协作,而不是单个流程环节的变化。基于此,所研发的弹性工作流系统首先依据部门职能细粒度的区分与定义部门的原子职能、定义并实现与原子职能匹配的、不可再分的原子业务,形成流程剖面。业务流程的新建和更改等则依据流程剖面,将业务流程实现为原子业务的组合与拼接,支持原子业务之间的任意组合,并以此来满足部门间协作等带来的业务流程易变性等需求。该系统既保留了柔性工作流引擎的多变性,同时也具有传统刚性工作流引擎易用性的特点。

Widely applied in OA (Office Automation) systems, workflow technology is faced with challenges of diversity and volatility. In view of this, we found that the diverse and volatile work flows are mainly caused by the coordination among departments and individuals instead of single procedure change. On this basis, we present a scalable workflow system based on procedure profiling. First, the functionalities of OA system are split and mapped to different atomic units according to the functions of different departments. Second, to satisfy the requirements of inter-departmental collaboration and continuous updates for workflows, a workflow is combined with atomic steps within the jurisdiction of each department. The system retains usability and scalability characteristics.