Workflow

Workflows may be viewed as one fundamental building block to be combined with other parts of an organization's structure such as information technology, teams, projects and hierarchies.

The invention of the typewriter and the copier helped spread the study of the rational organization of labor from the manufacturing shop floor to the office.

For example, Soviet mathematician and economist Leonid Kantorovich developed the seeds of linear programming in 1939 through efforts to solve a plywood manufacturer's production optimization issues.

[11][12] Second, World War II and the Apollo program drove process improvement forward with their demands for the rational organization of work.

The transmission of information from one organization to another is a critical issue in this inter-organizational context and raises the importance of tasks they describe as "validation", "verification" and "data usage analysis".

[19] The concept of workflow is closely related to several fields in operations research and other areas that study the nature of work, either quantitatively or qualitatively, such as artificial intelligence (in particular, the sub-discipline of AI planning) and ethnography.

Thus, the essential description of a component actually comprises only input and output that are described fully in terms of data types and their meaning (semantics).