Workflow management systems (WFMS) are enjoying increasing popular ity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Organizational processes are de scriptions of an organization's activities engineered to fulfill its mission such as completing a business contract or satisfying a specific customer request. Gaining control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve each process or adapt them to changing requirements. The goal of WFMSs is to manage these organizational processes and coordinate their execution. was demonstrated in the first half The high degree of interest in WFMSs of the 1990s by a significant increase in the number of commercial products (once estimated to about 250) and the estimated market size (in combined $2 billion in 1996. Ensuing maturity product sales and services) of about is demonstrated by consolidations during the last year. Ranging from mere e-mail based calendar tools and flow charting tools to very sophisticated inte grated development environments for distributed enterprise-wide applications and systems to support programming in the large, these products are finding an eager market and opening up important research and development op portunities. In spite of their early success in the market place, however, the current generation of systems can benefit from further research and develop ment, especially for increasingly complex and mission-critical applications.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

"This book combines concepts from systems theory, model driven software engineering, and ontologies for software engineering into a systematic method for engineering service oriented systems"--Provided by publisher.

Mastering interoperability in a computing environment consisting of different operating systems and hardware architectures is a key requirement which faces system engineers building distributed information systems. Distributed applications are a necessity in most central application sectors of the contemporary computerized society, for instance, in office automation, banking, manufacturing, telecommunication and transportation. This book focuses on the techniques available or under development, with the goal of easing the burden of constructing reliable and maintainable interoperable information systems. The topics covered in this book include: Management of distributed systems; Frameworks and construction tools; Open architectures and interoperability techniques; Experience with platforms like CORBA and RMI; Language interoperability (e.g. Java); Agents and mobility; Quality of service and fault tolerance; Workflow and object modelling issues; and Electronic commerce . The book contains the proceedings of the International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems II (DAIS'99), which was held June 28-July 1, 1999 in Helsinki, Finland. It was sponsored by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). The conference program presents the state of the art in research concerning distributed and interoperable systems. This is a topical research area where much activity is currently in progress. Interesting new aspects and innovative contributions are still arising regularly. The DAIS series of conferences is one of the main international forums where these important findings are reported.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of eight international workshops held in Ulm, Germany, in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2009, in September 2009. The eight workshops were on Empirical Research in Business Process Management (ER-BPM 2009), Reference Modeling (RefMod 2009), Business Process Design (BPD 2009), Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2009), Collaborative Business Processes (CBP 2009), Process-Oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth 2009), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2009), Event-Driven Business Process Management (edBPM 2009). The 67 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions.