Document Centric Design?

The Idea is that documents represent a single common data format for all processes. All processes produce or consume documents. A process that consumes no documents is called an originating process. A process that only consumes documents is called a terminating process.

Key Concepts:

1. Business Processes shall produce documents
   • documents can never be changed
   • documents record answers & decisions
   • not necessarily real documents (like *.xml, *.pdf, *.doc) but perhaps table structure
2. Business Processes consume documents
   • documents from other processes may feed this process
   • processes may develop natural dependencies based on the documents they need
   • processes may raise alerts based on the documents they need
   • some processes may not require any documents, these are originating processes
3. Originating Processes begin a new workflow
   • they originate a new workflow
   • they have no prerequisite documents
4. Business Processes are versioned and concurrent
   • clients default to starting the newest defined process under a given name
   • documents in process will finish in the version they started in (this is not to say you couldn't terminate processes to force people to use a new version )
5. Interviews are Processes concerned with asking questions
   • Interviewees are the people taking an interview
   • An Interviewer is a person filling in an interview form for a person
   • A Self-Directed Interview is an online interview with no human interviewer (the computer is conducting the interview)
   • answers are unique to an interviewee
   • answers relate to facts that we can assert about an interviewee.

In addition consider that all updates should themselves be a new process and document.