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According to Lano’s Classification, we see that
supplier, customer, delivery and order are external to
the organisational boundary and purchasing,
operational and selling are classified as part of
organisational boundary. This model is suitable for
some organisations and may not be standard across
other organisations.
2 ISSUES IN ORGANISATIONAL
WORKFLOW COMPONENTS
We find that an organisation would contain a
number of organisational units and divisions, such as
management, administration, operation and
customer service. Each one of these organisational
units could comprise of a number of smaller
functional units for which each may have one or
many workflow components for which they carry
out specific tasks, responsibility and workflow
processes. Therefore, an organisational workflow is
a composition of a number of workflow
components. Some workflow components are active
when changes take place and some are passive.
So far, no analysis has been done in literature for the
classification of workflow components, their inter-
relationships or formal definition of their attributes
and processes. There has been some existing
workflow modelling techniques used in literature to
help modelling the workflow and dynamic aspect of
the workflow, such as Petri Nets
(Aalst et al., 999),
Event-driven Models, State Event and Action Rules
(Nutt, 996) (Aalst et al., 2000), UML Activity
Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams and Extended
Activity Diagrams
(Gautama et al., 2000) (Gantama et
al., 2003)
. We found that these techniques allow for
modelling for existing processes. However,
a. They don’t model the inter-relationship between
the workflow components. Some aspect of
concurrency and asynchronous execution of the
different workflow process (i.e. multi-threading);
and
b. Their current use does not deal with the dynamic
aspect of workflow models or provide a clear
indication where the flexibility is allowed, when
changes occur or how the organisation can adapt the
changes at Just-In-Time; and
c. These modelling techniques only model one
aspect of organisational workflow, and sometimes
have too low a level of representation and they are
basically not applicable at the conceptual level of
development of complex organisational workflow
systems
(Bossidy et al., 2003) (Chang et al., 2003).
The necessity for modelling the workflow at a
higher level of granularity that involves many sub-
workflow components and workflow processes, their
interfaces, interaction and relationships
3 MAO MODEL [MANAGERIAL,
ADMINISTRATIVE AND
OPERATIONAL]
In our study, we have found that there are many
workflow components within an organisation and
these workflow components interact with each other
to achieve the organisation goals and objectives.
Therefore, we disseminate the organisation
workflow into following levels (refer to figure 3:)
Operational workflow relates to the core business
operations. It is usually measured by its
performance and by the volume of its output. The
operational workflow is the main source of value
generation for the organisation.
Administrative control workflows are involved in
making decisions and prioritising tasks and
scheduling tasks. The administrative task workflow
is measured by its efficiency.
Managerial workflow carries out business
decisions, which in turn control entire business
administration and is measured by the financial and
final results.
3.1 MAO in Collaborative Workflow
Environment
The advent of the Internet has provided mechanisms
to allow organisations to bind together, for carrying
out sales over great distances at any time. It has
created new modes for operation service and
marketing and enabled partnerships previously
inconceivable within a wide array of businesses as
well as other human activities. A consequence of
this connectivity and information richness is that one
is faced with an increasingly dynamic business
environment and workflow. Several factors
characterise this collaboration
(Chang et al., 2003),
namely:
A strong information infrastructure that extends
beyond the original closed walls of the individual
enterprise. High connectivity and electronic
handling of information, of all sorts including data
and documents.
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