Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are
the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the
right direction to start delivering on this promise. SOAs (service-oriented
architectures) promise to enable businesses to align their business processes
to customer needs, and optimize them to improve customer responsiveness and
drive efficiency. A process-oriented realization of SOAs is necessary to
deliver on this promise.
The process-oriented model is based on an SOA component model augmented with
an underlying formal model in which business processes are expressed through
orchestration and choreography. This model blends the bottom-up framework of
SOA with a top-down, process-centric view. By simplifying the set of
activities that are part of the life cycle of business processes, we'll
outline how this approach is... (more)