Yank Your Data Out of My Engine: A New Approach to Workflow System Design

Business process (or workflow) management is vital in enterprise application systems. Current workflow management systems (WfMSs) do not provide a clear separation between execution management and data management, such a lack of separation causes serious difficulties in managing data consistency and process change. This paper argues for an "execution independence" principle of isolating the two and thus their respective concerns. Following this principle, "universal artifacts" and a new conceptual architecture for WfMSs are developed, which help addressing many challenging issues in application development with the current WfMSs.