Make Sense Of Your Data - AgileSense Blog

Workflow applications and what makes them flexible

Rafi Dudekula , 06 / 21 / 2010 , workflows, integration, events

It is common among programmers or developers to create data driven applications using a group of forms with buttons. These group of forms can be accessed via menus or buttons. The application flow models specific business process flow. Such applications tend to be inflexible and brittle. Modeling a business process as a set of loosely coupled forms bound by a workflow makes for a far more flexible application. A workflow driven application lends itself very well in capturing events data that can be mined to produce insights. When business process changes it is easy to change the rules and reconfigure actions that are part of a workflow.

Recently I got into an interesting discussion with a developer who thought that the travel request business process workflow that I was working on, should be created as a regular forms based application and not as a workflow application. Most software developers are trained to view data driven applications as a series of connected forms that capture and format data. But flexible applications that need be be instrumented to emit or consume events so as to mine that data to get insights, lend themselves very well to workflow type applications. Workflows can be stopped, started. Specific users can be assigned role based permissions. A solid workflows infrastructure allows us to manage a large number of business processes including versioning and exceptions processing. The data a form or action can access can come from multiple data sources. Hence integration framework should be built into this workflows platform. AgileSense platform provides precisely this kind of infrastructure so that our customers can create flexible applications, monitor human as well as system interactions and mine the resulting data for insights to improve business performance.