ABSTRACT
The vertical corporation or organization—that time honored structure that is so often characterized by sluggish bureaucracy and many layers of management—is going the way of the dinosaur. Today’s volatile and competitive marketplace is changing the rules, and companies are being forced to reinvent themselves along horizontal lines. Out of this sea of change in corporate organizational philosophy has emerged a new class of business software for workflow automation. As companies become more horizontal, their requirements for workflow automation focus more on managing and coordinating the flow of work for processes that span the entire organization. They need software that addresses the way people would ideally coordinate and collaborate with each other to get work done, consistently across all processes and on all levels in the organization.
