This Widely Acknowledged Publication Will Introduce You To The
History Of Workflow, Its Impact On Conventional Business Models, Its
Relationship To Re-Engineering, The Cultural Resistance Workflow Faces,
And The Technology Itself.
"The industral revolution was not born of the need to free workers
from the menial... the early nineteenth century is littered with images
of sweatshops and assembly lines. Craftsman who had built their knowledge
and skill on the many generations of experience before them, gave
way to specialization and mechanization; the craftsmen where transformed
into cogs and the cogs turned faster and faster with each decade.
This new model of manufacturing demanded conformity, interchangability,
and rigid discipline, and ultimately Fredrick Winslow Taylor's time-motion
studies and yet further segregation of work functions into myriad,
precisely tuned components.
The worker was demeaned and nearly dehumanized.
That legacy followed us through the factory, the office, every conference
room and hallway of the enterprise -- until unimanginable increases
in computer power, connectivity, and affordability made it possible
to re-invent craftsmanship by making the tools and the knowledge needed
to innovate readily available throughout the industrialized world.
We have traveled 200 years and come full circle. Today's knowledge
workers are indeed the pinnacle of craftsmanship as masters of more
tools, knowledge, and experience than could have been wielded by 10,000
workers two centuries ago.
In tomorrows enterprise the knowledge worker will be freed to release
creative energy that will result in an era of enormous innovation
and discovery, fullfilling the potential and promise of the mind.
Workflow and Electronic Document Management are the foundation for
such far-fetched concepts to become reality. Ultimately these technologies
will unify the enterprise and make it impossible to separate the information
systems from the business systems, developers from the users, blue
collar from white collar. The diversity that leads to divisiveness
will give way to the collaboration that breeds prosperity. Then we
can say the revolution is over."
