long lasting wi's & usability question

[yegorm]

Dear all,

I would like to ask you for advice on designing workflows. Thank you advance.

We have a document management system which is mostly a custom
development. It processes objects like 'documents' and 'todo items'.
Users exchange these objects over workflow according to their business
processes (approval and so on).

Steps that are 'atomic' from the organizational point of view (i.e.
'execute a todo item'), are not at all atomic for the actor -
sometimes it takes days if not months to, say,  execute a todo item.
So, a typical user has a long list of todo workitems in his workspace
incoming folder, which becomes hard to manage. As a result, users are
asking us to provide some ways to organize workitems like custom
subfolders or tags and so on (they got this idea from the 'inbox zero'
concept of GTD).

What do you think? Is it some core methodological flaw in our workflow
design, or are the requested features simply beyond the workflow
metaphore (in other words, it's an organizational workflow, so, if a
user has some 'personal workflow' when executing his items, it is not
supposed to be in the system)?

Thank you in advance!


Best regards,
Egor Malov