Practical experiences and requirements on workflow

The purposes of this paper are to describe practical experiences on a business process (Hiring Process) automation by a workflow automation approach, and to point out the limitations of current business process automation from the workflow application developer's point of view. The limitations may be caused from the lack of human coordination, collaboration, group-decision, interoperability, scalability, correctness/reliability of workflow applications, exception handling, and a dynamic reflex of the organizational changes in current workflow modeling methodologies and workflow management systems.(1) By pointing out the insufficiencies through the practical experiences, we derive some requirements for workflow modeling methodologies and workflow management systems. We believe that those requirements are key infrastructures and research issues to successfully implement business process automation. Finally, workflow application developers should carefully consider the business process modeling methodology as well as the workflow management system when they automate their corporate processes to avoid mismatches.