Force.com's new Visual Process Manager is a big step forward in what I describe in my book as "situational applications":

... the speed and efficiency demanded of a resilient and responsive organization can occur only when employees find different ways to make continuous small adjustments that increase profits and decrease costs every day, every week, every month.

The only way to do this is to give them the tools and support they need to serve themselves.

“Self-service” does not mean turning business people into programmers. What it does mean is giving the right set of tools and support to the person closest to the problem, so that they can build powerful software solutions on their own. The goal is to get these knowledge workers to quickly put together “good enough” software solutions to solve specific problems – significantly reducing or even eliminating the time and coordination needed from IT. In this way, it becomes possible to address areas that were previously unaffordable or of low priority to the IT department. 

The target audience for a self-service approach is an educated professional (e.g., accountant, HR personnel) with modest computer literacy (and interest) that mostly includes the web and MS Office. They have basic computer experience like using a wizard to generate something new; interacting with spreadsheets, documents, and forms; and using drag and drop to rearrange items on the screen.

The types of applications being addressed will not replace core business applications. They address a different need – applications that are built for just a handful of users, applications that are used for only a few weeks or months, or applications that address a small piece of functionality. Called “situational applications,” they are a new software niche, where communities get form-fit, good-enough tools for the very particular needs of the community that uses them.  

Situational applications are a potent combination of tools, mindset, and methodology. They provide a formidable force that will help your organization meet today’s business challenges quickly and cost-effectively. It will reduce - or even eliminate in some cases - the need to use professional software developers (a valuable resource best used for enterprise-wide solutions), purchase an ill-fitting software package, or kludge a suboptimal, inefficient and incomplete solution using tools like Excel and email.

Here is Force.com's description of Visual Process Manager:

Force.com lets you automate any business process. Processes can be simple tasks—creating an activity, emailing an alert, or updating a data field—or more complex, like automating the quote–to-order process or scripting inbound and outbound calls. Whatever your process need, the new Visual Process Manager, together with workflow and approvals, enable you to rapidly design and run any business process in the cloud without infrastructure, software, or code.

Processes

Every company has hundreds of business processes. With the Visual Process Manager multi-step processes can be rapidly modeled in a visual designer and instantly run in the cloud.

Approvals

A specialized type of workflow called an “approval” can route information to a series of people, each of whom can approve or decline the information and then send it on to the next step in the process.

Rules

You can use various criteria to determine when a workflow is triggered. In addition, you can use rules to validate data and enforce business logic when a user is entering data. You can use formulas to perform calculations or to fill out other data based on user-defined entries.

Monitoring and queuing

Time-based workflows are placed into a queue that can be easily monitored from the administrative console. Creating transparency in business processes makes it easy to maintain an audit trail and keep tasks from falling through the cracks.

Tasks and alerts

It’s easy to alert people when their participation is required in a business process. Whether it’s to approve a PO or implement a request, alerts are sent via email and can be assigned as a Task in Force.com.