Enterprise business process management - Architecture, technology and standards

All enterprises' operations require integrating information, and processing information with applications. This has been true for decades, if not centuries. Information and application integration has evolved from completely person centered verbal communication (blacksmith to apprentice), through paper documents-mail-fax, email and Web page interactions. The information and applications control the flow of goods and operations on them. These are the business processes of the economy. Coming from vastly different starting points, the evolutionary paths of business designs and IT architectures are converging, in a striking example of convergent evolution. In some cases, enterprises are almost purely information processing businesses, e.g. insurance. The past few years have seen explosive growth in direct program-program interaction for application integration, removing manual steps to yield tremendous improvements in reliability and efficiency. Controlling the sequence of program interactions and information flow, and knowing the status of the flows, are fundamental to an enterprise's functions. Automating, monitoring and optimizing the flow is the field of business process management. The past two years have seen the emergence of several architectural and standards based innovations. This paper, with a focus on the end-to-end model, provides a technical overview of the standards, architecture, programming and runtime models that make modem BPM possible.