I always say that I learned about workflow working in a restaurant kitchen. If everyone doesn’t stand in the right place, do things in the right order and at the right time – people get burned, cut, poisoned and you lose customers. In that context, workflow refers to the work process.
Howie Fenton of NAPL wrote a good post yesterday on “Bringing Workflow Back” and all the different “things” that are called workflow these days: pre-press workflow, web-to-print workflow, etc. lamenting the over-use of the term. In the broader industry there is inbound document workflow ala DST’s AWD or workflow distribution like PegaSystems. This is all software, a thing that relies on well defined processes to operate effectively. At the end of the day, good software doesn’t help if you are just automating bad processes – or doing bad things faster as I like to say.
At least in your industry you probably won’t get burned, cut or poisoned because of it! But then again…