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This paper is a qualitative study of how social sciences faculty construct their research workflows with the help of technological tools. The purpose of this study is to examine faculty scholarly workflows and how both tools and practices support the research process. This paper could inform academic libraries on how to support scholars throughout the research process.

This is a qualitative study case study of ten faculty members from six research universities from the United States and Canada. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and recorded. Atlas.ti was used to code and analyze the transcripts; each participant was a separate case. Descriptive coding was used to identify digital tools used for collaboration; process and descriptive coding was utilized to examine practices in scholarly workflows.

Through case study analysis the results of this study include the role of technology in faculty research workflows. Each workflow was grouped into four categories: information literacy, information management, knowledge management, and scholarly communication. The findings included scholars creating simple workflows for efficiency and collaboration and utilizing workarounds.

The study did not observe faculty in the process of doing research and, thus, only reports on what the researchers say that they do.

The research is unique in that there is almost no research on how social scientists conduct their research workflows and the affordances/impasses of this process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how success emerges in a business process change initiative, given the often conflicting forces and challenges present in a workflow implementation. A detailed reflective analysis provides an opportunity to explore how different process enablers interact to achieve non‐obvious outcomes.

Data collection entailed semi‐structured interviews, observation of project activities, and analysis of project documentation for a workflow project at a public sector organisation (AustGov). Data collection occurred from project initiation to implementation and is analysed utilizing the process enterprise maturity model.

Despite encountering numerous issues, the process workflow went live as planned; the project was a success. The case demonstrates how project drivers interact in context to provide a coherent explanation of project outcomes. That the project did not fail, despite encountering obstacles and challenges, is attributed to the maturity of critical process enablers within the portfolio.

The AustGov case study provides an exemplar of how and why interrelationships between process enablers and project context matter. The case analysis provides a rich study of a workflow project, and demonstrates the suitability of the process audit framework to explain outcomes of business process change projects.

The findings demonstrate the importance of managing interdependencies and competing priorities between process enablers to successfully implement business process change.

The case provides a rich example of the implementation of business process change using workflow software. The authors find that achieving successful outcomes in a challenging environment is best understood when viewed from the perspective of the maturity of a portfolio of project enablers; also, that attention needs to be paid to developing advanced maturity in those enablers most closely related to the specific challenges evident in the project context.

Blockchain as a disruptive technology has revolutionized many industries, such as finance, logistics and manufacturing sectors. This paper aims to explore Blockchain applications in construction to effectively manage project workflows and uplift construction efficiency.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with various stakeholders from a public infrastructure project to analyze Blockchain applications in the construction industry. Eleven key construction workflows are selected to identify and discover the necessity and significance of Blockchain applications in the construction industry. They are related to construction program, daily operations and payment. Based on workflow analysis, several issues are discussed to design a development roadmap of Blockchain in the construction industry.

The findings show Blockchain can improve construction efficiency, reduce paper-based manual operation and address the fragmentation and communication issue. However, the development of Blockchain in the construction industry is still impeded by some challenges. Traditional work modes might be existing even though Blockchain-enabled systems are introduced, which may increase the workload of construction practitioners. Thus, a feasible and practical development roadmap is proposed to instruct implementation of Blockchain in construction.

This research systematically analyzes the development of Blockchain in the construction industry from several existing workflows, based on a real-life case study. Several considerations are given to provide referential value for applying Blockchain in the construction industry, including opportunities and challenges, cost–benefit analysis, obstacles and possible solutions, as well as development strategies with a prototype system.

This contribution aims to present the core components of a framework and illustrate the main concepts of a methodology for the systematic design and realization of security‐critical inter‐organizational workflows with a portion of a workflow‐scenario drawn from e‐government. It is additionally shown how the framework can be adapted to incorporate advanced security patterns like the Qualified Signature, which extends the concept of digital signature by requiring a natural person to sign.

The framework is based on a methodology that focuses on the correct implementation of security‐requirements and consists of a suite of tools that facilitates the cost‐efficient realization and management of decentralized, security‐critical workflows.

The framework has been prototypically validated through case studies from the healthcare and e‐government sector. Positive results in pilot applications with industrial partners encourage further steps: the set of supported security requirements is continuously extended (e.g. rights delegation, four eyes principle), a testing environment for industrial settings is being implemented, and the requirements for the efficient management of inter‐organizational workflows are being analysed systematically.

The framework caters to the needs of an industrial audience, in need of a cost‐efficient support for the systematic and correct realization of secure, inter‐organizational workflows.

The contribution provides a description of the Sectet framework. It is shown how it can be adapted to incorporate advanced security patterns like the Qualified Signature, which implement a legal requirement specific to e‐government.

This paper aims to gauge the feasibility of workflow technology as a potential solution to facilitating citizen participation in policy‐making processes. The gaps in and future direction of a current workflow models to be used to automate policy‐making processes are to be discussed.

A thorough review on the principles and philosophies of policy‐making processes and process models is performed to extract the core constructs of the processes. This follows critical analysis of existing workflow models to identify gaps of the models to be used to support policy‐making processes. An e‐participation perspective is also taken to identify additional modelling constructs that are required when a large number of citizens is involved in a workflow task for opinion gathering.

While workflow technology has been adopted in the public sector, the use of the technology is mostly limited to supporting administrative business processes, leaving the potential to automate policy‐making processes. There are some studies that take a life‐cycle approach for policy making and they can be the starting‐point of applying workflow technology to policy‐making process automation. The application of workflow technology to policy‐making processes is expected to facilitate the participation of citizens in these processes through the automatic delivery of relevant policy issues into citizens' lives. A new type of workflow model is required to reflect factors specific to the public sector, including rules for role resolution, considering large‐scale citizen participation and modelling constructs to penetrate into citizens' everyday lives for proactive stimulation for e‐participation.

The analysis is based on a literature review, and empirical data collection could complement the analysis results of the paper. This is included in the future research agenda.

The findings provide policy makers with a stimulus for adopting workflow technology in the public sector. Gap analysis and future directions of a workflow model for policy‐making processes are expected to be informative for any practitioners who are intending to develop workflow management systems in the public sector.

This paper is one of the first efforts to gauge the potential of using workflow technology from an e‐participation perspective to engage a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including citizens, in policy‐making processes.

This paper aims to present Long4Cloud (long-running workflows execution environment for cloud), a distributed and adaptive LRW execution environment delivered “as a service” solution.

LRWs last for hours, days or even months and their duration open the possibility of changes in business rules, service interruptions or even alterations of formal regulations of the business before the workflow completion. These events can lead to problems such as loss of intermediary results or exhaustion of computational resources used to manage the workflow execution. Existing solutions face those problems by merely allowing the replacement (at runtime) of services associated with activities of the LRW.

LONG4Cloud extends the previous works in two main aspects, namely, the inclusion of dynamic reconfiguration capabilities and the adoption of an “as a service” delivery mode. The reconfiguration mechanism uses quiescence principles, data and state management and provides multiple adaptive strategies. Long4Cloud also adopts a scenario-based analysis to decide the adaptation to be performed. Events such as changes in business rules or service failures trigger reconfigurations supported by the environment. These features have been put together in a solution delivered “as a service” that takes advantage of cloud elasticity and allows to better allocate cloud resources to fit into the demands of LRWs.

The original contribution of Long4Cloud is to incorporate adaptive capabilities into the LRW execution environment as an effective way to handle the specificities of this kind of workflow. Experiments using current data of a Brazilian health insurance company were carried out to evaluate Long4Cloud and show performance gains in the execution of LRWs submitted to the proposed environment.

This study aims to examine trauma room staff’s perception of factors that influence workflow in trauma care from a physical environment standpoint.

A semi-structured focus group method was used. Trauma team members, representative of various roles within a team, were recruited from five Level I trauma centers in the USA, through a convenience sampling method. A total of 53 participants were recruited to participate in online focus groups. The Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety model was used to analyze the findings.

In addition to factors directly related to the physical environment, aspects of people and technology, such as crowding and access to technology, were found to be related to the physical environment. Examples of factors that improve or hinder workflow are layout design, appropriate room size, doors, sink locations, access to resources such as X-ray or blood and access to technology. Seamless and uninterrupted workflow is crucial in achieving efficient and safe care in the time-pressured environments of trauma rooms. To support workflow, the physical environment can offer solutions through effective layout design, thoughtful location of resources and technology and room size.

Trauma rooms are time-pressured and complex environments where seconds matter to save a patient’s life. Ensuring safe and efficient care requires seamless workflow. However, the literature on workflow in trauma rooms is limited.

The traditional methods for process modeling emphasize the process workflow considerations at the cost of the associated process structure and resource communication. In the real process world, however, all these aspects are integrated and appear simultaneously: the workflows are driven by communication across the structure of resources. The aim of this paper is to explore a new approach based on an innovative, two‐dimensional view of the process world in an enterprise, integrating the workflow, the structure, and the communication from the beginning on.

Contrary to the traditional methods, the workflow diagrams are not directly designed by the process modeler, but rather they are automatically generated from the connectivity of specified resource communication. The modular documentation contains text and graphic information about the entire process world (structure of process resources, structure of process workflows, resource communication and interaction, communication through internal/external interfaces).

A new systematic approach to modular, process‐oriented enterprise description has been developed. Its two‐dimensional model allows an integrated visualization of the entire process world. The resulting process documentation is absolutely consistent and of very high quality. The user‐friendly access to information is made possible by clear interdependencies of process‐defining objects embedded in a relational documentation model. An update of the complete documentation can be performed automatically from the common database. The successful software implementation of the prototype application and its use in small customer projects demonstrate the practical feasibility of the two‐dimensional approach.

The two‐dimensional process modeling (2DPM) is a new systematic approach to modular process‐oriented enterprise description. A software implementation based on the underlying model together with professional programming tools and principles would be necessary to arrive at a marketable product.

The increase in business process management projects in the past decade has seen an increase in demand for business process modelling (BPM) techniques. A rapidly growing aspect of BPM is the use of workflow management systems to automate routine and sequential processes. Workflows tend to move away from traditional definitions of business processes that can often be forced to fit a model that does not suit its nature. Existing process modelling tools tend to be biased to either the informational, behavioural or object‐oriented aspect of the workflow. Because of this, models can often miss important aspects of a workflow. As well as managing the relationship between the types of model it is important to consider who will be using it, as process models are useful in various ways. The paper aims to address these issues.

This paper reports on a case study in a manufacturing company, where users were surveyed to see which are the notations that are most common in modelling based on two main categories (i.e. behavioural and informational).

The research outcomes showed that there is no prevailing set of standards used for either of these categories, while most users feel the need to use more than one approach to model their system at any given time. Many companies face problems when trying to model the behaviour of human workers in the business processes. Existing techniques are mostly designed at modelling information systems or business processes, and rarely attempt to integrate the two.

This paper proposes the use of a new hybrid modelling methodology, which is an original idea, on existing tools and methodologies. Key authors in the literature recommend against the trend of developing a brand new methodology, so existing tools from each end of the scale were combined to provide a solution which is capable of modelling IS and BP.

Notes that a flexible workflow, which is characterized by its fast responsiveness in dealing with customer demands through the integration of various value chain activities, is fundamental to achieve efficient information interchange among companies. Flexible workflow integration, extends the scope of flexible workflow to cover a unified approach for integrating the relevant stages of operations, incorporates workflow design, workflow modeling and system assimilation, all of which are the integral components of such an approach. This paper proposes a system which possesses the features of reconfigurability and customizability, allowing the integration of workflow in a flexible way under an industrial environment. Describes the proposed methodology of this approach, which aims at achieving a seamless assimilation of workflow processes.