'Green' Workflow
The Problem
Not enough emphasis is placed today on the ‘Green’ benefits of workflow solutions. Workflow & Collaboration Solutions are good for the environment and their use should be obligatory by the Government. The most fundamental reason are:
- Reduction of paper use for the benefit of forests, and reduction of the need to recycle paper (energy use etc).
- More efficient use of computing and resources leading to reduced power consumption, and fuel costs for transporting paper and from office to office.
- Reduction of carbon footprint (fuel & energy cost reduction, reduction of paper use & storage) through the use of ancillary collaborative technologies that support workflow (like Instant Messaging, teleconferencing, document web-stores and team collaboration spaces)
It is therefore apparent that one of the most beneficial moves the government could make towards protecting the environment would be to prepare an unsustainable ways withdrawal plan for all public services centered around the adoption of workflow and online forms solutions for eGovernment.
However, public services tend to be very tactical in the way they implement process automation. This is largely due to the amorphous and pervasive nature of the business process in a complex organisational structure. In large enterprises, workflow normally gets implemented based on an immediate tactical business pain that needs to be resolved and therefore can deliver immediate and tangible business value (ROI). Typical examples of initiatives can include cost reduction, increased efficiencies, regulatory compliance etc. These are well understood and therefore can be quantified. On the other hand, public services are still getting to grips with what ‘Green IT’ is and therefore making a tangible business case for automation in this context is not yet a priority, but may become more common place in future.
The Solution
Mandate Process Automation. Process automation can contribute to ‘Green IT’ initiatives and Governments should mandate the use of workflow due to the following benefits:
- Reduced paper use;
- Collaborating and efficiency gains (by improving processes);
- Carbon footprint reduction.
Mandating automation is a way of introducing workflow to public services but personnel and citizens will be asking: "what is in it for us?", "where is the value?" and "how do we manage the behavioural and organisational change?"
It is apparent that there is great potential in automation for public services. However, local governments and public services do not always fully understand how and when to address automation and the Green IT agenda to ensure quantifiable business benefits. As a result, in the immediate future, public services will continue to be very tactical in the way they implement process automation (Green BPM). This is largely due to the amorphous and pervasive nature of the business processes they have to model in relation to the complexity of their organisational structure.
Business Process Management
The design, implementation, management and ongoing improvement of business processes - has the potential to make very substantial contributions to the measurable impact of any Green or Sustainability program.
The introduction of web-based collaboration tools and social media software provides an opportunity to leverage e-work and telecommuting and redesign business processes to add green-friendly business value while improving the collaboration and coordination both inside and outside the firewall.
Thinking in a systemic manner is a requirement for effective Business Process Management. The global warming crisis is a systemic problem that won't be solved until a critical mass of people is taught how to think systemically about sustainability. This way of approaching business process design is an inherently "Green" approach and therefore has an increased chance of adoption by any company or group seeking to achieve Green goals.
FC can support a number of OSS Workflow (WFW) engines and solutions, including:
- Apache ODE: It executes business processes written following the WS-BPEL standard. It talks to web services, sending and receiving messages, handling data manipulation and error recovery as described by the process definition. It supports both long and short living process executions to orchestrate all the services that are part of an application.
- Taverna: An open source tool for designing and executing workflows created by the myGrid team and funded through OMII-UK. The family consists of the Taverna Engine (the workhorse), and the Taverna Workbench (desktop client) and Taverna Server (remote workflow execution server) that sit on top of the Engine. Taverna allows for the automation of experimental methods through the use of a number of different services (such as Web services) from a very diverse set of domains - from biology, chemistry and medicine to music, meteorology and social sciences. Effectively Taverna allows a scientist with limited computing background and limited technical resources and support to construct highly complex analyses over public and private data and computational resources, all from a standard PC, UNIX box or Apple computer.
- ActiveBPEL: An open source implementation of a BPEL 1.1 engine, written in Java. The ActiveBPEL Engine runs in any standard servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. The Engine does not contain a visual designer that allows to easily and quickly create BPEL orchestrations. It only supports the execution of previously-coded BPEL 1.1 processes and it is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
- Zebra: A workflow engine - originally developed to fill in the gaps in some commercial and open source workflow engines. The main components of Zebra are the workflow engine, the Persistance Adaptor (currently Hibernate), the workflow designer (current in Visual Basic), Antelope a sample application for Zebra, Meercat a component used by Zebra/Antelope to manage Hibernate sessions, Penguin a Turbine Pull tool for form redisplay, Fulcrum Hivemind Port - a port of the Jakarta Fulcrum to run under hivemind. Zebra aims to provide a useable workflow engine for commercial and open source applications. It is being built in Java and is designed to be database independant.
- OpenSymphony: It can be considered a "low level" workflow implementation. Situations like "loops" and "conditions" that might be represented by a graphical icon in other workflow systems must be "coded" in OSWorkflow. It does not mandate a graphical tool for developing workflows, and the recommended approach is to write the xml workflow descriptors 'by hand'. It is up to the application developer to provide this sort of integration, as well as any integration with existing code and databases. OSWorkflow requires PropertySet, and OSCore. Furthermore, OSWorkflow makes heavy usage of the many useful features in OSCore, and therefore OSCore version 2.2.0 or above is required to use OSWorkflow.