Does work actually flow?

In businesses, things happen that cause employees to do stuff. This 'stuff' is called 'work'. Work generally does not start and end in an instant. Like everything else in life, it happens with respect to time. This stuff called work flows and therefore we naturally call the phenomenon workflow[1].

Chuffed with the acuity of our analysis, we might be inclined to take a logical leap. Namely, given enough effort, we can identify definite patterns in the way work flows. We can then capture these patterns in a form that computer systems can execute. Doing so will allow us to automate those pesky workflows for the greater good of the organization.

Hmmmm. I'm not so sure. Douglas Adam's posited the existence of a planet where all ballpoint pens go to when they are lost[2]. Another Douglas (coincidence?) - Douglas Hofstadter - posited the existence of a country he called Tumbolia[3] where software goes to rest while the hardware it is running on is down.

I posit that somewhere in the rolling green hills of Tumbolia there is a valley chock-full of machine readable workflows that have been abandoned by the organizations that created them. In fact, there are so many abandoned workflows there, that Tumbolia residents want their government to ship them off to a separate planet dumping ground.

In my experience, workflows - even very complex ones - can be gross over-simplifications of the real world. In mechanizing a workflow, architects typically use concepts of task, role and transition. Simply put, a workflow is a combination of tasks. Tasks are 'resting places' in a workflow. To move a workflow from one resting place to another, somebody playing the right role must move the work along by doing something. The 'something' that they do must be a valid something per the workflow. It must result in an approved transition from one resting place to another. If you don't have the right role or if you are doing the wrong thing or trying an unapproved transition, the computer will stop you. It will beep or start sulking or turn various options of gray on you.

This is the point at which one-way tickets to Tumbolia are purchased. In the real world, workflows are not always simple combinations of states and if-then-else rules. There generally is no immovable set of roles. No inviolate set of transitions. Heck, it may not even be clear if anyone in the organization understands how the workflow actually works. Double-heck, it may not even be clear that the rules (such as they are) sit still long enough to capture them on a diagram -- never mind in a computer program.

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