A learning component for workflow management systems

In order to compete in today's rapidly changing business environments, an organization has to be able to continuously adjust to new requirements and situations. Two strategies towards achieving this goal are organizational memory and organizational learning. At an abstract level, organizational memory means to store and manage the information an enterprise acquires during performance of their business processes. Organizational learning on the other hand means to use this information in order to continuously improve the knowledge about business performance. The topic of the paper is the support of organizational memory and organizational learning by workflow management systems (WFMSs). A WFMS implements the process definition/instantiation/enactment paradigm and thus relies on an explicit representation of knowledge about how to perform business processes. The authors propose the storing, managing and reuse of this knowledge in order to realize a learning organization.