Workflow engines are the most difficult thing to sell in organisations as the usecases are open ended. Organisations needs certain level of maturity to understand that they need one
People assume all workflow engines need all complicated document logic and business aware routing.
We built one for a medium sized business without any of that. It's essentially a form system where the users can select the next destination for the form's approval on their own. Users understand the business process and are responsible for implementing it in any other context, turns out, they are capable of managing it in an online forms system as well.
Then all you really need is an auditing system that tracks all the states the document has moved through and displays that to users who are making decisions based on the form and that state. Add "final approval" and "return for revision" and "recall" states and you're pretty much set.
No business specific logic. No need to keep the system configuration in sync with the organizational chart. No need to build "vacation delegation" or "user impersonation" features. You just need to keep the forms up to date with the business use cases, the users will manage everything else on their own.
Our system has been in place for around 6 years now. We do maybe two form updates a year. We have not changed the backend code or system logic since it was deployed. The only other support issues we have to deal with are when the LDAP integration configuration needs to be updated.
To a certain extent, that was certainly the idea, the main difference would be that once a flow is started it is not editable. It has to be returned or recalled to be changed, and then the audit trail starts over again.
That's also a valid criticism. Especially if you're expecting a lot of automated processes to be kicked off once an appropriate approval chain exists. This really is only well suited to businesses where there are limited opportunities for automation. In this particular case, once they recognized that all of the terminal business process steps are mostly manual anyways, they understood the utility of something so simple.. and cheap.
That and a lot of engineers are genuinely excited to build their own workflow engine - whether they call it that or not - because it’s complicated and it feels like they just discovered a brand new and powerful abstraction.
Tears follow when the team either doesn’t account for all the edge cases or doesn’t have the resources to address them.
