Introduction

Workflow is an emerging information technology that helps organizations implement efficient business processes. While initial workflow applications focused on automating office work, workflow technologies are now also used to support enterprise integration and e-commerce applications. We believe that this is the first special issue of a major information systems journal that is entirely devoted to this subject. We therefore start the issue with an overview of the technology and outline a framework for considering the major research issues in this emerging field. We then introduce the five other contributions to the special issue in the context of this research framework.

Because each paper is discussed more fully in the context of our introductory paper, we simply list the topics and authors here. The first three papers in the issue cover technical issues. The first paper, “Extermination the Dynamic Change Bug: A Concrete Approach to Support Workflow Change,” by van der Aalst, describes a technique for dynamically changing workflow process instances in response to changing business requirements. He uses Petri net theory to rigorously prove a number of properties of his approach. In the second paper, “Managing Workflow Authorization Constraints Through Active Database Constraints, “Casati, Castano and Fugini propose a new technique for specifying and executing complex constraints regarding which workflow users are authorized to perform which tasks and use which software applications. The third technical paper, “Performance Analytic Models and Analyses for Workflow Architectures,” by Kim and Ellis uses queuing theory to analyze the performance of three different workflow architectures under increasing transaction loads.

The remaining two papers in the special issue address more methodological issues. Wirtz, Giese and Weske, in their paper, “The OCoN Approach to Workflow Modeling in Object-Oriented Systems,” propose a new technique for modeling workflow processes. In the final paper, “Creating Shared Information Spaces to Support Collaborative Design Work,” Davis et al introduce a new methodology for analyzing collaborative work and describe their experiences with the implementation of a collaborative tool in a large manufacturing organization.

We wish to thank the authors for their contributions and the many referees who helped ensure the quality of this special issue.

Guest Editors:
Edward A. Stohr, Stevens Institute of Technology
J. Leon Zhao, University of Arizona