| Summary: | Since many organizations have been facing pressure to reduce costs, to increase
quality, and to provide rapid delivery of new services and products, they often resort
to optimizing the way they do businesses. The use of workflow systems may improve
the efficiency of an organizational process, thereby reducing costs and increasing
workload capacity. It can also allow people to concentrate on value-added activities
by freeing them from worrying about paper flows, filing, information tracing, and
whether or not certain actions have been taken. Many workflow products, however,
are fundamentally driven by vendor specifications without the support of a well-developed
theoretical foundation. This thesis begins with an introduction of an Object-
Oriented Workflow Model (OOWM). The OOWM extends an ontologically
developed modelling method, Object-Oriented Enterprise Modeling (OOEM), by
including workflow constructs with the purpose of describing the task structure of an
organizational process. It also presents the architecture of an Object-Oriented
Workflow Management System (OOWMS) which enacts the contents of the OOWM.
Finally, based on the proposed architectural blueprint, a prototype of the workflow
system was implemented, by using existing technologies, for a purchase requisition
process. === Business, Sauder School of === Graduate
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