Workgroup Snapshot

Work-flow systems are supposed to be the processing glue that cuts across the boundaries of multiple computing platforms, applications, departments, and locations. These systems would essentially run the business process, and in so doing eliminate such corporate fixtures as interoffice mail, paper, and clerical tasks.

The benefit would be efficiency through automation, which would shrink process-cycle times from weeks to days. When computers run the show, human interaction will no longer be the bottle neck to getting work done: All those pesky human-resource problems become a thing of the past.

Here's a news flash: We haven't realized that dream. Work-flow product vendors who clumsil y jumped on the bandwagon are partly to blame. Some E-mail, forms, BBS, imaging, fax, and browser vendors claim that their products are, do, or know work flow. Labeling most of these products as work-flow systems is analogous to calling Visual Basic a database management system. Such mislabeling confuses buyers and makes selecting work-flow engines difficult, because there are so many players with different technical characteristics and capabilities on the market.

Today's better work-flow systems approach the market from one of two perspectives. At the high end are document-imaging product vendors; pushing up into the work-flow realm are developers of E-mail, groupware, and electronic-forms products. The current crop of work-flow engines is a combination of front-end development environments tied to common back ends, riding over de facto standard E-mail transports and connected to proprietary, simple logic-processing engines.