Document coordination patterns

Abstract

Many organizations lack support for document workflow management, making it difficult to efficiently handle business processes. Implementing a workflow management service that encompasses all organizational tasks is both complex and costly. However, document workflows can be observed as structured sets of identifiable workflow patterns. These patterns have been extensively described in the literature based on real-world organizational processes. By adopting and integrating these patterns into document workflows, it is possible to enable documents to autonomously determine the processes they should execute. The paper explores the application of a well-known set of workflow patterns in email-based document workflows and outlines the necessary conditions for integrating workflow management directly into documents. Documents circulating within an organization can easily collect information about their workflow in the form of logs with minimal effort. By applying process mining techniques, it is possible to extract the actual processes they follow. The proposed in the paper canonical set of document workflow patterns enables a much faster implementation of a document management application compared to a top-down approach, where processes are theoretically defined first and then implemented.