In our Alfresco projects, the issue of workflows often arises, and unfortunately, in a significant number of cases, the built-in BPM / Activiti solution is not suitable for the user, as these workflow engines require specialized technical knowledge, which means that customers cannot handle the task themselves. From a user perspective, the modeling, implementation, deployment, and maintenance of processes are also complicated, clearly designed by engineers for engineers.

In the redesign process, we prioritized the following aspects:

• Processes should be definable at the site level, instead of traditional “workflow”, we should create Task Lists that are much easier to understand
• Task Lists should be definable in a tabular format with minimal administration
• We should simplify the creation of complex Task Flows as much as possible, i.e., the formulation of processes should be free-text, and artificial intelligence should be able to create processes from human language – see below
• It should be possible to define relationships between Task Lists (related task lists), i.e., a larger process should be divisible into multiple sequential Task Lists and the tasks within them
• There should be no need for IT technical knowledge in creating, maintaining, and using processes
• There should be an option for automatic folder and document creation within tasks
• We should manage the relationship between automatically created documents
• It should be possible to assign responsibilities (groups) to specific tasks and automatically manage permission changes
• We should simplify tasks to decisions and provide the user with all the information needed for the decision – describe what needs to be done, show the previous steps and the entire process
• There should be an option to display user Work Baskets (Task Lists) and process their contents
• There should be an option to delegate tasks to an AI colleague – for example, in a procurement process, there could be a step where the invoice data is extracted from the uploaded document by the AI

… and now, let’s see the collAIgue during work, where it creates a Procurement Workflow in Alfresco after a textual description: