Business processes do not start or end at the boundaries of organizations. To support the participation of external agents in a workflow, the communication between workflow systems, or of a workflow system with other external IT-systems we propose a communication architecture which mainly relies on WWW-technology and the exchange of structured documents (forms). We separate the definition of a process and the assignment of agents from the communication with this agent to provide greater flexibility. We propose the use of HTML and XML forms for communication since these documents are readable for humans and are easily transformed into database records.

Top