This book is about the management of business processes. This is certainly not a new topic. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it has been written about from every possible point of view—economic, sociological, psychological, accountancy, mechanical engineering and business administration. In this book, we examine the management of business processes from the perspective of computing, or—to put it more broadly—of information technology. The reason is that information technology has made huge leaps forward in recent years, resulting in the creation of completely new ways of organizing business processes. The development of generic software packages for managing business processes—so-called workflow management systems (WFMS)—is particularly important in this respect.
