Revised Workflows

Conservation Community,

Revised workflow diagrams have been posted to the discussion of ConservationSpace. The new diagrams can be found as Version 2 at the very beginning of each activity that was modeled in the community design process we began last spring. They have also been added as the final page in the PDF package of documents for each activity.

In addition to incorporating you comments, these revised workflow diagrams have been moved one more step toward a design for software development by being recast in BPMN - Business Process Modeling Notation. You will still recognize them, but the BPMN adds a consistency that makes them more useful for software developers. Within each diagram you will also find the related documents, associated with that sequence of workflow. Most of these were mentioned in the New York and London community design meetings, but many are the result of emails and blog postings over the last several months.

Many conservators have asked during this review process why this design effort is based on process and workflow, with documents following along in a secondary capacity. The most important benefit of this process-centric approach over document-centric alternatives is that it renders explicit a large body of tacit knowledge about how different organizations produce the same document. This knowledge is relatively unimportant within any single institution; indeed, it may even seem banal once it is made explicit, precisely because it is so deeply embedded into the institution’s own practices. However, that knowledge becomes critical when one is trying to build software to serve multiple institutions, because it turns out that different institutions often proceed in very different ways to produce even identical documents. The failure to recognize this difference in tacit knowledge and practices is one of the chief reasons for the frequent failure of software built in one institution to thrive in another.

If you would like to know more about business process modeling and the use of BPM for software development, let me point you to two resources: For an easy online overview, search BPMN at Wikipedia in lots of languages. If this engenders a real fascination, go get BPM Basics for Dummies (yes it’s free!) in English, Spanish, Japanese, French and German online from a German company, Software AG .

What happens next? Comments and additional posts at conservationspace.org/blog are always welcome. At the same time, the core team will be wrapping up this design phase by December 2009, with a final report to accompany the design documents and with an exploration of avenues for application development. Everything will be posted at conservationspace.org/blog.