An organizational-memory-based approach for an evolutionary workflow management system-concepts and implementation

We present an evolutionary workflow management system (WMS) that is used as an instrument for increasing control and continuous improvement of workflows. The evolutionary WMS supports two learning cycles in the sense of organizational learning: an inner cycle for learning by doing and an outer cycle for learning by supervision. In cooperation with a manufacturing company we implemented a prototype of an Organizational Memory Information System (OMIS) bused on a large-scale WMS. The system architecture, an application scenario, and the components of the evolutionary WMS are presented. The WMS itself is (a part of) an OMIS: it updates the storage with knowledge that is generated during the execution of business processes and, in turn, uses the stored knowledge for planning, controlling, and executing business processes. The benefits of the suggested approach are mainly resulting from the fact that the OMIS components are highly integrated into the workflow system