It's difficult to discuss BPM without also discussing Web services or Web services without BPM. As the impact of Web services begins to grow within many organizations, so will the degree of complexity surrounding this new enterprise computing paradigm. To fully leverage the advantages offered by Web services in the delivery of application resources and information requires the same type of coordination or orchestration that is provided by BPM software.
Web Services are a fundamental technology building block of a open Business Process Management solution. Everything we do in business is a process. Web Services exist to allow an organization to publish their processes as services as well as to subscribe to other company's services to become part of their processes.
Publishing a process as a Web Service
Publishing a business process, such as an order entry process for a company's distributors, is easy with BizFlow or Visual Enterprise. Once a process has been defined it is a simple matter to publish the process to a UDDI directory where distributors can then find and subscribe to it. And since the process is already deployed it's ready to begin receiving orders immediately.
Subscribing to a Web Service
Subscribing to commercial or corporate Web Services is just as easy. Once the service has been found in the UDDI directory the object can simply be dragged and dropped into a new or existing process flow diagram and immediately put to use. For example a formerly manual step in a process to perform a credit verification on a pending order can be replaced by a Web Service offered by a commercial credit agency.
BPM users will be able to quickly add automated Web Service processes, such as order and quotation services, to their existing business process applications as well as to publish their own business processes as services in the UDDI directory. By publishing their business processes in the directory, customers will be able to instantly engage in online transactions with internal business groups or external business partners. These extended business processes can then be managed proactively using the process management features of the BPM engine, increasing management visibility across the entire B2B implementation.
For example, a parts manufacturer could implement their order entry business process using their BPM workflow engine and then using the new Web Services option publish its corporate information and that order entry process in the UDDI directory. An appliance manufacturer searching the directory would find the parts manufacturer and using the published service, integrate the ordering of those parts as an element of a new appliance design. This new business relationship could directly integrate the parts manufacturer's order system with the appliance manufacturers inventory system, saving both parties considerable time and money through the instant exchange of price, availability and specification information.
Web Services for EAI
There are many existing solutions for EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) that provide facilities for connecting one system to another, by abstracting their often proprietary interfaces, and providing a simple means of moving and transforming data between these systems. Some BPM systems also provide varying levels of support for connecting to legacy systems. However, Web Services presents a huge opportunity to become the "Lingua Franca" of EAI - in the future, it is expected that Web Services will become the preferred method to communicate with any external system, either inside or outside the firewall - and BPM systems will leverage Web Services to enable integration with almost any external system.
Emerging Standards
New standards are emerging at a rapid pace that define the way that Web Services are combined and deployed to achieve business tasks. BEA Systems, Microsoft and IBM introduced Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) in mid 2002. Other emerging standards include:
WC3 have also recently formed a Web Services Choreography working group to examine the emerging standards in this area. However, it will be some time before a clear de-facto standard emerges.
Many next-generation BPM products support one or more of these evolving standards, while insulating their users from the underlying complexity. These products have been engineered using the fundamental building blocks of Web Services including, SOAP, UDDI, and XML which makes open and extensible solutions possible today.
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Business Process Management
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