It’s all very well me asking if your workflow is effective, but not much use without a practical example.

In enterprise content management, workflows are often deployed to represent the full content lifecycle, as in the diagram below (click on the image to get a full size version).

These steps could all be recreated in your content management system and managed in an online environment, with notifications being sent via email to the relevant users at each step in the process. You’d need to ask, however, who would benefit?

This sort of workflow is likely to be less effective to implement in an online environment with comments flying around via email than a bunch of relevant people sitting down together and discussing the subject in question. Yes, there probably needs to be an audit trail with a clear indication of who changed what when, but this is only at certain stage gates. In fact, you could probably constrain almost any workflow to something along the following model:

Author creates draft → Internal review (reject or approve) → External review (reject or approve) → Publish → Archive after 6 months.

All the intermittent issues of who should comment on what kind of detail at what stage are tacitly understood, rather than made explicit online. But the review processes can only be instigated once the previous stage gate is complete, so you still have control over publication and, depending on your CMS, you have a more or less robust audit trail. Why over-complicate matters? Enterprise 1.01 will usually do.