Have you ever worked in a place that lacked any workflow automation, whatsoever? I sure have. I can recall a number of businesses in my dark distant past that chose to forgo workflow automation, relying instead upon a set of strictly verbal (not to mention highly cryptic) instructions and undocumented procedures. And I vividly remember an instance from my corporate days, when the workflow automation specialists came to live with us for a while …

But what exactly is workflow automation?

Workflow automation is often referred to as business process
management. Industry specialists include: Incession (WorkPoint),
InfoPrise Integrify, It’s the Content, Savvion, Opalis, Pega,
Teamplate, Tibco, and many others.

Thompson Information Systems defines workflow automation concisely,
as “the computerized control and coordination of related activities in
an organization.”

The University of Michigan goes into a bit more depth, defining
workflow automation as “The combination of software, tools and services
to automate knowledge-based tasks, on an ad hoc or production-based
level. Technologies commonly incorporated in workflow automation
include document imaging and management, knowledge management and
groupware.”

At the time, we feared the invasion of those workflow automation
folks into our little corporate sanctuary. We thought that they were
there to eliminate our cushy corporate jobs. As it turned out,
thankfully, they weren’t. They were there to help make our work lives
(and the lives of anyone that followed in our positions) easier.

Of course, our cushy corporate jobs got eliminated anyway. But that
surely wasn’t the fault of the workflow automation engineers …