Data and information both usually use as alternatives to one and another but information is more active term as compared to data, which is more passive in nature. That is the reason why information is also termed as processed data. The same holds true for information and knowledge where knowledge is more active as compare to the term, information.

Beside the fact, which is more active and more passive, we are living in an age where these three terms have revolutionized the world. Organizations now a day has no survival if they really dont understand and respect the three terms. Although for organizations to be remaining in the field of their respective game, the clear understanding of these terms is mandatory. Information Technology is what the outcome of humans respect for the term, information. In any organization you will find an IT department, what is this?

Organizations need Information technology, which has proved itself as one of the must for them. The need of IT is increasing rapidly and more and more organizations are moving toward the serious deployment of it. Information technology staff is not cheap at all. They are costly, which shows that organizations now seriously thinking about getting the competitive advantage on others by using IT infrastructure.

Originations, those already have IT, now moving toward some other newly emerging technologies and paradigms coming out of it. Many are important and have proved themselves as the must for organizations and enterprises. Like Enterprise Resource planning Systems, Customer Relation Management Systems, Workflow Automation Systems and many more.

WAS (Workflow Automation System) is a new ingredient in IT infrastructure. Many vendors are now coming in the market of WAS. It is getting popularity and hope we will see some serious generic implementation in the near future. WAS, as implemented by many organizations, has proved itself as an excellent replacement of manual workflow systems of organization. Organization now moving toward WAS because many of them really dont want paper full offices. In fact they want paperless offices. WAS has many advantage over manual workflow systems but before describing its advantages let me define the two terms, workflow and automation.

Workflow is defined as the flow of documents in any organization from one member of the organization to the other or from one member to group of peoples or may be between departments and usually it is.

For example if I am the manager of production and my company has two departments only. Suppose our companys sales department got an order from customer. Sales department needs to forward this order to production department. Now sales department have a choice, they can forward the order to production department with out wasting of time or may be they wait for a whole day, collect all orders from different customers, complied them in a file format and at the end of the day forward them to production department.

Are you feeling that companies dont like this? Yes you are right. This is a latency in the production. Company has got the order and why it is waiting to start the production. Now at this stage I, as the production manager really dont want to waste my precious time. I want some thing automated. I want to start the production as soon as I get the order. Now at this stage we need the definition of second term, the Automation. Automation can be defined as the process of taking a manual process and applying technology to it. We take the process of organization s workflow and try to apply technology to it. What is required? Yes you are right. Only a computer software which enables production department staff (in our example) to see that an order has been received with the following specification plus all the required information needed by the production department to start work on it and thats it. Now u can fell how efficiency will improve by the company. Their production will increase which definitely will increase its revenue.

It is really a very small example of WAS capabilities. In actual WAS contains enormous capabilities which every organization wish to have. As mentioned before WAS generic implementations are coming in the market and vendors are taking serious interests in it but we hope organizations will realize the importance of time also take hurry to deploying this emerging and exciting technology.