On the road to service-oriented architectures, someone forgot to pack the people. So says a group of software companies with a stake in SOA's future. Comprising Active Endpoints; Adobe Systems, Inc.; BEA Systems, Inc.; IBM; Oracle Corp.; and SAP AG, the coalition earlier this summer moved to address that supposed omission by submitting a BPEL4People specification to OASIS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing open technology standards.
At the heart of the matter is the business process execution language (BPEL) that some developers use to orchestrate the processes in a service-oriented architecture. "The thing with BPEL is that ... it only deals with automated processes," says Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies, a technology analyst firm.
BPEL4People is actually an umbrella term covering two proposed standards -- BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask. The logic underpinning the would-be specifications is that almost any business process flow, no matter how automated, demands human intervention sooner or later. Baer offers the example of the "available to promise" process in manufacturing. In a services-oriented IT environment, a customer's request for expedited delivery may trigger a series of mini IT processes or services -- checking the product stock for availability, determining the nearest location for shipment, assessing the weather for possible flight interference, etc.
Nestled in the middle of that chain, however, is the question of the customer's standing. A manufacturer may jump through hoops to deliver for a client that purchases $10 million worth of merchandise each year, but not for one that spends $100. Those extremes are pretty simple to account for in an automated process, Baer notes, but what about customers in the middle?
"In borderline cases, that may not be an obvious decision. You may need a person in the process," he says. BPEL4People, he explains, essentially states, "In this orchestrated process, here's a placeholder because we're going to have a human process here." The second spec, WS-HumanTask, specifies what that task is. Once a person has intervened to make a decision, the chain of automated processes resumes.
A parallel example in the financial services industry, Baer says, involves a credit card company that receives a request for a credit limit increase. Prior to this summer's subprime lending debacle, a certain credit score might have sailed through an automated process to approval. Now, the need for greater scrutiny may compel the lender to divert some transactions to a person to make a judgment call.
Although observers disagree on the need for such standards, the real question, according to Baer, is not whether OASIS will ratify them -- Baer expects that the organization will. "The question is whether they will be used." He predicts a brighter future for WS-HumanTask than for BPEL4People, mainly because the latter depends on BPEL adoption, which has been slow.
This article originally appeared in the September 2007 issue of Managing Automation.