Шаблоны деятельности и результаты работы.

Pattern of activity often with a result

A workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatable patterns of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. From a more abstract or higher level perspective, workflow may be considered a view or representation of real work. The flow being described may refer to a document, service, or product that is being transferred from one step to another. Workflows may be viewed as one fundamental building block to be combined with other parts of an organization's structure such as information technology, teams, projects and hierarchies.

The development of the concept of a workflow occurred above a series of loosely defined, overlapping eras.

The modern history of workflows can be traced to Frederick Taylor and Henry Gantt, although the term "workflow" was not in use as such during their lifetimes. One of the earliest instances of the term "work flow" was in a railway engineering journal from 1921. Taylor and Gantt launched the study of the deliberate, rational organization of work, primarily in the context of manufacturing. This gave rise to time and motion studies. Related concepts include job shops and queuing systems (Markov chains). The 1948 book Cheaper by the Dozen introduced the emerging concepts to the context of family life.

The invention of the typewriter and the copier helped spread the study of the rational organization of labor from the manufacturing shop floor to the office. Filing systems and other sophisticated systems for managing physical information flows evolved. Several events likely contributed to the development of formalized information workflows. First, the field of optimization theory matured and developed mathematical optimization techniques. For example, Soviet mathematician and economist Leonid Kantorovich developed the seeds of linear programming in 1939 through efforts to solve a plywood manufacturer's production optimization issues. Second, World War II and the Apollo program drove process improvement forward with their demands for the rational organization of work.

In the post war era, the work of W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran led to a focus on quality, first in Japanese companies, and more globally from the 1980s: there were various movements ranging from total quality management to Six Sigma, and then more qualitative notions of business process re engineering. This led to more efforts to improve workflows, in knowledge economy sectors as well as in manufacturing. Variable demands on workflows were recognised when the theory of critical paths and moving bottlenecks was considered.

Basu and Kumar note that the term "workflow management" has been used to refer to tasks associated with the flow of information through the value chain rather than the flow of material goods: they characterise the definition, analysis and management of information as "workflow management". They note that workflow can be managed within a single organisation, where distinct roles are allocated to individual resources, and also across multiple organisations or distributed locations, where attention needs to be paid to the interactions between activities which are located at the organizational or locational boundaries. The transmission of information from one organization to another is a critical issue in this inter organizational context and raises the importance of tasks they describe as "validation", "verification" and "data usage analysis".

A workflow management system (WfMS) is a software system for setting up, performing, and monitoring a defined sequence of processes and tasks, with the broad goals of increasing productivity, reducing costs, becoming more agile, and improving information exchange within an organization. These systems may be process centric or data centric, and they may represent the workflow as graphical maps. A workflow management system may also include an extensible interface so that external software applications can be integrated and provide support for wide area workflows that provide faster response times and improved productivity. Flow control: This is a control concept applied to workflows, to distinguish from static control of buffers of material or orders, to mean a more dynamic control of flow speed and flow volumes in motion and in process. Such orientation to dynamic aspects is the basic foundation to prepare for more advanced job shop controls, such as just in time or just in sequence. In transit visibility: This monitoring concept applies to transported material as well as to work in process or work in progress, i. e., workflows.

Modeling: Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph based formalisms like Petri nets. Measurement: Many of the concepts used to measure scheduling systems in operations research are useful for measuring general workflows. These include throughput, processing time, and other regular metrics. Specialized connotations: The term "workflow" has specialized connotations in information technology, document management, and imaging. Since 1993, one trade consortium specifically focused on workflow management and the interoperability of workflow management systems, the Workflow Management Coalition. Scientific workflow systems: These found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, when they met the need for multiple interconnected tools that handle multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows resembles the well established practice of Perl programming in life science research organizations, making this adoption a natural step towards more structured infrastructure setup. Human machine interaction: Several conceptualizations of mixed initiative workflows have been studied, particularly in the military, where automated agents play roles just as humans do. For innovative, adaptive, and collaborative human work, the techniques of human interaction management are required. Workflow analysis: Workflow systems allow users to develop executable processes with no familiarity with formal programming concepts. Automated workflow analysis techniques can help users analyze the properties of user workflows to conduct verification of certain properties before executing them, e. g., analyzing flow control or data flow. Examples of tools based on formal analysis frameworks have been developed and used for the analysis of scientific workflows and can be extended to the analysis of other types of workflows.