4 Key Digital Functionalities

Key Digital Functionalities describe the core (required) functions that this Building Block must be able to perform.

The Workflow Building Block enables the creation and automatic execution of business processes. Any application used to implement the Workflow Building Block specification must provide the following Key Digital Functionalities.

4.1 Workflow Process Building

Workflow Building Block candidates must allow business users to create arbitrary workflow processes. These processes must be able to perform calculations, make API requests (e.g. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, HTTPS) make HTTP requests, and execute scripts.

4.2 Workflow Process Execution

Workflow Building Block candidates (to differentiate themselves from mere business-process modelling tools) must be able to execute workflow processes:

1. via web API,

2. via manual interaction (click to run),

3. or via the passage of time.

4.3 Status Monitoring

Workflow Building Block candidates must allow business users to monitor the status of process instances.

4.4 Programmatic Process Discovery

1. Workflow will not need to provide RPA (Robotic Process Automation) capabilities. This means automated control of graphical user interfaces (UI), if required within a Building Block, will be handled by a third-party RPA tool which can be integrated into the Workflow Building Block for orchestration.

2. Workflow is not always responsible for data flow or information mediation. It only performs limited data management within the context of a parent-predefined workflow process. There are many cases where a building block application will make a request to another GovStack service (via the information mediator) or to an external service (via an API gateway, for example) which does not involve workflow at all.

3. While the WFbb does provide process scheduling capabilities, it is not always responsible for scheduling the execution of processes. For example, a process may be instantiated at a particular time by another application independently determining when to send that “start process” API call to the Workflow engine. In this case, Workflow is not responsible for scheduling but merely executes the process when told to by another application.

4. Parallel processing of workflow process instances is an optional useful feature to support scaling requirements for production deployments. WFbb is not prescriptive on technologies and/or patterns that may be employed to support such capabilities, which may include, for example, multi-threading, service workers and/or message queues e.t.c

5. While workflow process start and stop capabilities have been listed as key digital functionalities, WFbb is not prescriptive on possible transcation management processes (e.g durability, rollbacks), state management, memory object clean-ups, garbage collection, alerts and/or general data management routines that should be considered to facilitate safe, reliable and predictable stoppage of workflow processes. Workflow Building Block candidates must provide an API which allows another application or developer to find a list of all available workflow processes for a given project or workspace.