Towards a real-world oriented workflow system-based on practical experiments for three years

Current commercial workflow systems handle only information that is in digital format. However, when they are applied to actual business in an office, we sometimes want to manage not only digital information but also human activities and documents, under some constraints such as the work context and computer environment. In this study, a workflow that handles information found in the real world as well as digital information in the system is called a “real-world oriented workflow”. To study the workflow, we implemented a prototype workflow system for research budget management in a national facility as a case study. Based on this case study, this paper describes the design principles and methods of supporting the real-world oriented workflow. The effectiveness of the prototype workflow system, which was used for actual business for three years, is shown