A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by
a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy
and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and
learned. Workflows are always designed to achieve processing intents
of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or
information processing. Workflows are closely related to other concepts
used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions,
teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Workflows may be viewed as
one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among
these concepts are described later in this entry. The term is used in
computer programming to capture and develop human to machine interaction.
Software such as K2 and Microsoft's Windows Workflow Foundation aim
to provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex
processing of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without
the need to understand computers or programming.