Service Composition - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 211

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Service Com position
Every enterprise has unique characteristics that are embedded in its busi-
ness processes. Most enterprises perform a similar set of repeatable routine
activities that may include the development of manufacturing products
and services, bringing these products and services to market and satisfy-
ing the customers who purchase them. Automated business processes can
perform such activities. We may view an automated business process as
a precisely choreographed sequence of activities systematically directed
toward performing a certain business task and bringing it to completion.
Examples of typical processes in manufacturing firms include among other
things new product development (which cuts across research and develop-
ment, marketing, and manufacturing), customer order fulfillment (which
combines sales, manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, and billing),
and financial asset management. The possibility to design, structure, mea-
sure processes, and determine their contribution to customer value makes
them an important starting point for business improvement and innovation
initiatives.
The largest possible process in an organization is the value chain. The
value chain is decomposed into a set of core business processes and support
processes necessary to produce a product or product line. These core busi-
ness processes are subdivided into activities. An activity is an element that
performs a specific function within a process. Activities can be as simple as
sending or receiving a message or as complex as coordinating the execu-
tion of other processes and activities. A business process may encompass
complex activities, some of which run on back-end systems, such as a credit
check, automated billing, a purchase order, stock updates and shipping, or
even such frivolous activities as sending a document, and filling a form.
A business process activity may invoke another business process in the
same or a different business system domain. Activities will inevitably vary
greatly from one company to another and from one business analysis effort
to another.
At runtime, a business process definition may have multiple instantia-
tions, each operating independently of the other, and each instantiation may
have multiple activities that are concurrently active. A process instance is
a defined thread of activity that is being enacted (managed) by a workflow
engine. In general, instances of a process, its current state, and the history of
its actions will be visible at runtime and expressed in terms of the business
process definition so that
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