SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

The integration of research in the area of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) with current methodologies and tools of
Business Processes Management Systems (BPMS) will bring significant contributions to the objectives of dynamic
process management in modern enterprises. However, at the current state of development of both BPMS and SOA, this
dynamism is limited by numerous factors. This article aims to provide a brief survey of on-going research in the
application of Service Oriented Architectures in Business Process Management, examining its usage, its relation with
other technologies and related open issues. In particular we take a specific view of the problem, namely that of the
software engineer that is asked to design, develop and implement service architectures under current business process
management systems. We proceed presenting a simple case study that captures some of the proposed methodologies and
tools and we use such case study to highlight a number of problems related to the implementation of such architectures in
real world situations.
KEYWORDS
Service Oriented Architectures, Business Processes Management Systems, Web Services, e-Commerce
1. INTRODUCTION
Change is the only constant in today’s business. Enterprises do not make contracts/agreements for long-
term periods. On the contrary alliances are made for short-period strategies that can last some days and even
less. In this dynamical environment, enterprises cannot survive without well-organized and adaptive business
processes. To face the challenge, current business processes, consisting of numerous habits, practices,
disjoint data models, application logic, workflows and many other point solutions repeated a hundred times
in a hundred places, need to be rationalized. What is sought out by corporate enterprises is not a new "silver
bullet" system to replace existing "legacy" systems, nor a new "business process layer" in an already complex
IT stack. Rather, companies need the capability to recast all business processes into a standard form that is
open to manipulation by the familiar tools and skills already in place.

To achieve such fundamental shift from process reengineering to dynamic process management,
companies are in the process of investigating and experimenting new systems such as Business Process
Management System (BPMS) (see, for example http://www.bpmg.org/) as well as emerging standardized
architectures like Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), a new methodology for building distributed
applications where elementary business processes, exposed as services, can be published, discovered and
bound together to create more complex valued-added business processes [Papazoglou and Dubrey, 2004].

This article aims at providing a brief survey of on-going research in the application of Service Oriented
Architectures in business process management, examining its usage, its relation with other technologies and
related open issues. In particular we take a specific view of the problem, namely a developer point of view on
service architectures under current business process management systems. We proceed presenting a simple
case study that captures some of the proposed methodologies, tools and we use such case study to highlight a
number of problems related to the implementation of such architectures in real world situations.