Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
BPM - adoption of standards
Last, but no less important, is the evaluation of how well the features of the selected BPMS
relate to established standards. There are two standards you should check for current ap-
plications, the
Web Service Human Task
(
WS-HT
) standard and the BPMN 2.0 standard.
The WS-HT standard defines two main features:
• A standard set of APIs (interfaces) to interact and manage human activities.
• A complete and flexible human activities life cycle. This life cycle defines the
states through which a human interaction will transit during its life.
Also, the BPMN 2.0 standard defines a set of XML tags to describe business processes,
their interactions with external systems, and their structures.
The biggest advantage of having a set of standard API's is that the better the different im-
plementations adhere to those standards, the easier it is to decouple the definitions of pro-
cesses from the engine's internal functionality—this allows for the possibility of migrating
to another technology if you ever wish to. We will learn more about BPMN 2.0 and human
Human Interactions
, respectively.
