Document Centric Design?
Originally published .
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:
- 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
- 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
- Originating Processes begin a new workflow
- they originate a new workflow
- they have no prerequisite documents
- 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 )
- 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.