BPM, SOA and WOA:Where are these technologies heading?

Abstract

This paper surveys the state-of-the art in BPM, SOA and WOA anno 2007. We argue that the vision of inter company BPM based on agile business process creation and dynamic lookup of services based on WSDL and UDDI has not materialised. Instead formalised BPM, based on BPMN and BPEL-WS, has become the preserve of fortune 500 companies. In such companies the technologies are used to break down silo applications and perform internal business process integration, often based on ESB. However, nifty inter company business process integration is also taking place, but mainly based on WOA, where simple access to corporate services is based on XML documents supplied by the REST protocol, and integration is done via mash-ups and Web 2.0 scripting technologies.We argue that both technology sets have their justification and can co-exist - formalised BPM based on SOA, especially ESB, on the inside of company firewalls, and WOA based on XML, REST and mash-ups on the outside. </p