A paper in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems proposes using meta models to compare workflow management systems, illustrated with two commercial products from the 1990s.
The paper, published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems and reported here by The Gufo, argues that choosing a workflow management system is difficult because many systems follow different workflow paradigms. The authors propose a meta model approach to evaluate and compare such systems. As a worked example, they compare the meta models of two products, WorkParty from Siemens Nixdorf and FlowMark from IBM.
The method, as described in the paper, starts with a general introduction to meta modelling, then builds and compares product-specific meta models for the two systems before generalising them into what the authors call meta reference models.
The authors present the WorkParty-FlowMark comparison as an example to show how the approach works, not as a complete evaluation of available systems. They describe their organisational reference meta model as something that "helps users in specifying their requirements" rather than a finished selection tool.
For students and practitioners, the paper offers a structured way to think about comparing workflow systems rather than a ready checklist. It is a methodological proposal illustrated with two specific, now-historical products, and its reference models are meant as a starting point for specifying requirements, not a substitute for evaluating current systems.
