Workflow Sample

Yesterday we introduced a workflow for "Applying for Permission to Access a Data Center", which requires approval from a supervisor. Alas, if we are to face reality we must acknowledge the fact that many of our reasons for entering a data center involve an emergency. Meaning, there's no time to wait for the boss's approval.

The below workflow will allow for a more flexible operation. In this workflow, general affairs can check the date and reason and make the decision to send the access request fax themselves, whether or not the boss okayed it yet. In other words, the actual approval can be done afterward. (Note that the supervisor's approval won't have control over downstream tasks.)

Even in today's "cloud" trend, most medium-size major corporations are expected to keep their own servers in data centers for at least another three years. We can image information center managers accessing an external data center while attempting to ignore the familiar cable spaghetti and muttering, "just thinking about transferring to IaaS or PaaS gives me the shivers..." (We suggest considering SaaS!)

Our second article in the "photo shoot" series shall concern product photo shoots for mail-order companies.
In particular, an apparel company's mail-order website has to change its photos for every shift in season, trend, or current topic. Photo shoots are an everyday workflow. They will need to be speedy. (In our sample today, we envision at least five directors, five photographers and five web designers in charge of image processing.)

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And so it goes with photographs. Today, regardless of the industry, most companies use photos at least at some point in their business. And taking photos for your business can sometimes entail truly specialized skills.

However, the "photo shoot workflow" is not the easiest to handle. One difficulty lies in the task of communicating to the photographer exactly what kind of photo one wants. So what can we do here? Our first workflow sample in our "photo shoot" series will be for a website design company.

We introduced a workflow for drafting newspaper articles in "A Transparent Workflow for Drafting Newspaper Articles." Today let's look at trying to prevent the very sad blunder of reporters covering the same story.

One very simply way of doing this is sending an automatic email to other reporters in the department once a draft is complete.

In our sample workflow today, the "reporter's" job is to draft articles, the "originating editor" conducts the first edit (including checking reporting methods), the "copy editor" is in charge of each article's position, size and final draft, and the "translator" translates the final draft.

The process of preparing articles is a model of well-organized distribution of work that involves a lot of computer work. This kind of work is perfect for a workflow system or BPM system.

The type of work leave an employee takes is important information for HR, but employees usually don't care too much about whether their day off is a substitute holiday, a paid holiday or what. To an employee they look pretty much the same; they are holidays that have to be registered and approved by the boss. And to further confuse the matter, consecutive holidays could be a combination of both (or more) types.

Having separate forms for each type of holiday (substitute, paid, condolence, not sure what type, etc...) will usually result in a lot of wasted time and energy on mistakes and send-backs. The below workflow offers one form for all types of holidays.