Moving from Business to Technology with Service-Based Processes

Software services (such as e-procurement and e-payment) are fundamental to large-scale systems that cross enterprise boundaries by forming e-business marketplaces. To enable complex business collaborations, executable processes can combine these services into service networks1 in which executable process descriptions coordinate service interactions. (We can write such descriptions with Business Process Execution Language for Web Services; BPEL, www-106.ibm.com/devel operworks/library/ws-bpel.) The use of process technologies to model and implement service interactions has several advantages over applicationcentric solutions. From a business perspective, software services more closely match the services a company offers, given that business processes are modeled to follow business activities, events, and message exchanges. From a technical perspective, software services offer the ability to structure and manage system-to-system communication by designing technical processes to fit in with legacy systems and previously implemented services. A process designer must consider both of these perspectives. Rather than imposing limitations on the final (technical) process design, the technical process should ideally be designed to directly correspond to the business process. Constraints in legacy systems often lead to differences, or misfits, between the desired business process and the implemented technical process, so that the resulting system fails to support all aspects of the business. In this article, we examine crucial criteria for constructing technical processes that support business processes. The research community has studied the general gap between enterprise business processes and information system functionality,2,3 but our work differs in two aspects. First, we examine misfit, focusing mainly on executable process specifica-