Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

ZapNote: Business Genetics

Even though there are undoubtedly large numbers of business process standards, Business Genetics insists that there are no standards that truly model a business’ overall processes. They say the world of business modeling is fairly restricted to implementing confining use cases and specific transaction-oriented business processes. While UML provides a great way to model various processes, it is not a great way to model a business communication process. The goal is that the Extended Business Modeling Language (xBML) will be one of the first formalized frameworks to model a business environment.