Service Composition - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 216

responsibility, or authority but may also refer to other attributes such as skill,
location, value data, time, or date.
Workflow technology tends to relegate integration functions, such as syn-
chronizing data between disparate packaged and legacy applications, to
custom code within its activities—and thus outside the scope of the process
model. Moreover, it uses a tightly coupled integration style that employs low-
level APIs and that has confined workflow to local, homogeneous system
environments, such as within a department or division. Therefore, tradi-
tional workflow implementations are closely tied to the enterprise in which
they are deployed and cannot be reliably extended outside organizational
borders to customers, suppliers, and other partners. As a consequence, one
of the major limitations of WMSs is integration: they are not good at connect-
ing cross-enterprise systems together. Modern workflow technology tries to
address this deficiency by extending this functionality to cross-enterprise
process integration by employing business process management functional-
ity. They achieve this by integrating middleware, process sequencing, and
orchestration mechanisms as well as transaction processing capabilities (see
“Service Composition” later).
The definition, creation, and management of the execution of workflow
are achieved by a workflow management system running on one or more
workflow engines. A workflow management system is capable of interpret-
ing the process and activity definitions, interacting with workflow partici-
pants, and, where required, invoking the use of software-enabled tools and
applications. Most WMSs integrate with other systems used by an enter-
prise, such as document management systems, databases, e-mail systems,
office automation products, geographic information systems, and produc-
tion applications.
10.3 Business Process Management (BPM)
BPM is a commitment to expressing, understanding, representing, and man-
aging a business (or the portion of business to which it is applied) in terms of
a collection of business processes that are responsive to a business environ-
ment of internal or external events. The term management of business processes
includes process analysis, process definition and redefinition, resource allo-
cation, scheduling, measurement of process quality and efficiency, and pro-
cess optimization. Process optimization includes collection and analysis of
both real-time measures (monitoring) and strategic measures (performance
management) and their correlation as the basis for process improvement and
innovation. A BPM solution is a graphical productivity tool for modeling,
integrating, monitoring, and optimizing process flows of all sizes, crossing
any application, company boundary, or human interaction. BPM codifies