Six Patterns for Process-Driven Architectures

In the last ten years workflow technology [FLDR00] has evolved as an important technological artefact, as far as Business Process Management [Prior03] is concerned. Today, a process engine takes the role of a process controller within a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture [FB+96], in order to coordinate and distribute tasks in a heterogeneous system environment. The resulting applications represent socio-technical systems, where business steps are carried out fully automatically, or by human interaction. People and IT systems themselves become an integral part of the process. Thus, in this respect a process engine represents an important artefact within an enterprise architecture. IT strategies have furthermore changed accordingly to achieve that process-driven system architecture, in order to flexibly change and adapt business processes in a distributed environment. For this reason, the general aim of Process-Driven Architectures is to decouple process logic from business logic.