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by Chris Chiappinelli, MA Editorial Staff
Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007 4:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | A coalition of vendors unites to support the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications, which add a human element back into automated business processes. |
| Keywords: | service-oriented architecture, SOA, Active Endpoints, Adobe Systems, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAP AG, BPEL4People, OASIS, BPEL, business process execution language, WS-HumanTask, services-oriented IT, automated business processes |
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. [Click to continue] |
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