Goflow6206

Copyright policy

Wikipedia's policies prohibit use of copyrighted works that do not fall under fair use, unless the author explicitly releases them to the GFDL or public domain. Also, since Wikipedia is not a press release, permission to be used in press releases is irrelevant anyway. -Amarkov ^blah_edits 22:21, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree. It was not a copy of the press release. It was a simply a DESCRIPTION of the organization similar to the DESCRIPTION of the organization that appears at the bottom of a press release.

In any case, fair use means a small extraction, and the page was by no means a copy of the press release. In fact, the subject of the page was really nothing about the press release at all. Only the description of the organization was similar.

The description of the organization was copied from the site... -Amarkov ^blah_edits 22:29, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually that site was not the source, it was itself a copy from text which was specifically made available by the coalition for use in purposes such as this. But I will edit it to assure that there is no question.

Workflow...

• Honestly, I would delete that article, too. I'm not familiar with business models, and I don't really know any other WP editors who are. Danny Lilithborne 23:20, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Well I completely rewrote it so that it is no longer the same as any other page on the internet. But I don't even care. Workflow Management Coalition was in the middle of most of the standards that exist today. There is a very interesting study done at Steven's Institute about the role that the coalition played in the history of distributed systems.

• • Well, if an admin judges it to be notable, they'll remove the tag. 'Til then, you should try to clean the article up a bit and rewrite it so it sounds less like an ad. Regards, Danny Lilithborne 23:42, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Business Process

For your information: The discussion between Kai Simon and myself on Talk:Business process#Just Plain Wrong in response to your initial comment was getting way off topic, so I have started a discussion on my SOAPbox blog instead. --RichardVeryard 12:19, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the comments which I did not notice for a few days. This is a much better discussion than I expected.

Value: I see that my original statment was not clear. I think we all agree that the activities in a business process add "value" to the organization that does the process. Richard has argued this very successfully: "why else would an organization do them?" Kai points out that the value comes from the process as a whole. I don't disagree.

Source of the value: My discomfort comes from saying that the value "is created by transforming an input into a more valuable output." This is a particular way of viewing the world, and it is not an uncommon one. Kai is right to point out that this is not exclusively an IT concept, and Porter's "Value Chain Analysis" is applicable to many processes, (e.g. manufacturing processes) which are not IT related.

I attributed it to an IT point of view because this world view fits so well to programming languages where you pass input parameters to a routine, and you get a result back, which is often an improvement over what you sent in. It seems that there is a lot of marketing hype today about Service Oriented Architectures that pass data around from service to service, and "add value" along the way. (Of course any "orchestration" that calls a service that decreases the value is classified as a "bug").

The view that a process transforms input into higher values outputs is certainly useful in many situations. But I believe particularly in the case of business processes this view gets in the way of understanding what what is going on. This becomes more important when this view is used not just to discuss a process, but to actually model the process, committing that model to a concrete modeling format.

There are many things that happen in a business process that simply are not best viewed as transforming inputs to output. Let me loosly call these things "communicative" events. Saying "I'm done!" has an effect on potentially many other people in the organization, in redefining what they should be doing. This kind of speech act is important to the success of the organization. It is possible to view this speech act as something that "transforms" an 'unfinished document' into a 'finished document'. What about saying: "I quit!" It is a stretch to say that this transforms anything into a thing of higher value. The quitting phrase might be applicable to a number of works in progress.

I don't mean to say that it can

Business processes...