Take a moment to think about all the things you do every day in your work. You may come up with a huge list of individual tasks that are directly related to your organizational responsibilities and accountabilities. You will also come to realize that you interact extensively with your peers and direct managers. If you work in a medium- or large-size company, you may also cross-collaborate with departments or groups outside of your own. All this interaction happens in many different ways. It can happen in the many e-mails you send and receive every day, in phone calls, during the frequent knock-on-someone-else’s door, in meetings, and in chat messages. Even when we do not realize we’re doing it, we all play roles in different business processes. We all interact and need these frequent small communication exchanges to get things done and to make the necessary decisions that keep our businesses working. However, in many cases, coordinating business processes is complicated, and employees do not collaborate in the most efficient way. Also, some business processes are quite complex in the sense that they require interaction between multiple actors and systems.

There is more to all these challenges and opportunities. While all of this out-of-band interaction takes place, we fail to update back-end systems that exist to help store information related to a business process. Sometimes we do not update systems because of all the overhead and increased work that they bring. We either get the work done or spend our time tracking metadata. Back-end systems represent a huge investment for companies, and sadly, they may be seen as overhead since they do not map to the real way that people work. In many cases, back-end systems require end users to log on to other systems to copy and paste data. The consequence: frustrated employees and slow business productivity.

Fortunately, new workflow technologies provide the option to automate and coordinate business processes. Workflows help bring together the power of human collaboration with the power of software to improve communication and task management. Workflows allow you to route specific tasks to different actors and systems. Therefore, you can streamline business processes while greatly increasing business efficiency. Additionally, workflows provide end users the ability to work productively by not requiring them to log on to all the systems in which the enterprise has invested.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to a new set of workflow capabilities offered by the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You will explore different Microsoft products and technologies that you can use to build custom OBA workflow solutions. Hopefully, this chapter can help you understand how to leverage your current technology investments and think about the wide variety of custom workflow solutions and architectures that you can use to optimize the efficiency of your business processes.