Bussiness Administration

A Methodology for Developing User Interfaces to Workflow Information Systems

by Josefina Guerrero Garcia

PhD Thesis Josefina Guerrero García

Supporting business processes through the help of workflow systems is a necessary prerequisite for many companies to... more Supporting business processes through the help of workflow systems is a necessary prerequisite for many companies to stay competitive. An important task is the specification of workflow, i.e. the parts of a business process that can be supported by a computer-based system.
This thesis introduces a methodology for developing user interfaces for a workflow information system in a systematic way. The methodology involves a set of models that capture the various aspects required for this purpose, a user interface description language to specify the corresponding user interface, a method to structure the usage of these models, and software support. The methodology is delineated by a set of requirements that are elicited and motivated by the state of the art and relying on a framework to model workflow. The validation of the proposed methodology is achieved by applying it over different real-world case studies belonging to different domains of human activity. The methodology provides designers with methodological guidance on how to derive user interfaces of workflow information systems from a series of models, which is unprecedented.
For this purpose, a workflow is recursively decomposed into processes that are in turn decomposed into tasks. Each task gives rise to a task model whose structure, ordering, and connection with the domain model allows a semi-automated generation of corresponding user interfaces by model-to-model transformation. Reshuffling tasks within a same process or reordering processes within a same workflow is straightforwardly propagated as a natural consequence of the  mapping model used in the model-driven engineering. The various models involved in the method can be edited in a graphical editor based on Petri Nets and simulated interactively. This editor also contains a set of workflow user interface patterns that are ready to use.