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.
