Workflow - A Step closer to 100% automation

Everybody's looking for some or the other kind of automation. An employer needs to automate the process of hiring as much as possible. An employee needs to automate the process of applying for jobs. A teacher wants to automate the process of creating grade-sheet while a student wants them to be collected automatically. I need to automate the process of earning money!!

Workflow, I believe, is the base ingredient of any automation. Be it testing before satellite/shuttle launch or alerting an individual about his pending tasks.

Again, I took help of Google on Workflow and I got more than 1 million results. I'm in dilemma again - do I have lot of choices or whether most of them just describe the well known problem?

Thankfully, I got some solutions -- some promissing while others not. Anyway... today, I would blog about how workflow can help achieve automation.

Let us analyse both the processes - workflow and automation - closely. What is the job of an automated process? It does some predefined tasks governed by some predefined rules. In case of an unexpected result at any point of time, alerts may be sent to the concerned people - may be over an SMS or as simple mails.

What is a workflow? My definition of workflow would be - "A diagramatic representation of a predefined process following certain predefined rules". If you say I am wrong, put a comment and I'll respond on it. I found an strikingly similar definition at e-WorkFlow.

My definition of workflow concludes that workflow and automation are one and the other thing. Easier said than done. More often than not, the processes are not well-defined. It is not that there's something wrong in the process but it's just that the processes are more humane and have more tolerance and flexibility.

For example, if my boss is absent, I may just sent a note on his desk, inform HR and get out of the office. What if the HR was absent? What if the next concerned (after HR) was also absent? Well, there are umpteen number of possibilities and to take care of each of them makes automation very very complex.

Today, I conclude by saying that workflows are good starting points towards automation. How do we take care of "human and flexible" process - I'd talk about it sometime later.

The GoogleAds in the sidebar will give upto 4 sponsored links on websites related to Workflow. Just go and check... how people are making money using Workflow -- towards automation.