Workflow
Supporting clever workflows is one of these holy grails in IT. And it seems that we are not able to crack this very easily. We have of course at one side of the spectrum the very retrictive transaction processing (I do the payment, my boss approves ...), and here we have made quite some progress (nothing difficult here). But the other side of the spectrum is where it gets more interesting.More complex is trying to get a handle on the more diffuse ways of working, medical protocols, research, ... In the 1980's we have seen attempts at expert systems, but they never really became mainstream. And also now, 20 years later, all I have seen to date is very basic ... Of course we do very clever stuff with demonstrator robots from Sony (and others) that recognize patterns and know how to react on this (this is a step forward), but in the office domain I am still looking for a breakthrough.
Why is this? Probably because a lot of what we humans do is not easily replicated. Workflows like the analysis of a data set, or writing a report on a difficult subject, or developing an idea are still very fuzzy and hard to define. The only thing we have today for this part is the more control oriented workflow, where we check that we have taken the right steps (i.e. protocols, like used by doctors), or that we have documented what we have defined is mandatory (i.e. tracking of mandatory deliverables related to decision gates). The first one is not main stream yet (so I still expect more developments in this space) and the second one is so basic, that I hardly can call this workflow. So we have to settle for the simpler higher level type of workflow - and still wait for the breakthrough!
Labels: knowledge management
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 12:03 PM
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