Affiliations: European Research Center for Information Systems,
Münster, Germany University of Waikato Management School, Hamilton,
New Zealand
Abstract: The intention of this paper is to present, in a nutshell, important
contributing developments of the last decade that have resulted in a better
understanding of applications and technologies needed for present-day service
incarnations. We start from process modelling and management, which has its
origins in the early 1990s, and which has paved the way for a new understanding
of business dynamics and interactions. Technically, process modelling has first
led to workflow management, in an attempt to (further) automate internal and
external process executions. Yet what is well-understood by now is that process
modelling alone is not sufficient, but needs to be complemented by an adequate
process management. Once processes and workflows are in place, a common desire
nowadays is their outsourcing, and this is a typical situation where Web
services enter the picture. Services can also be seen as yet another approach
to application integration, whose history has included such diverse directions
as remote procedure call (RPC), object-oriented middleware and brokering, or
application service provisioning (ASP). Web services have recently emerged as a
primarily industrial paradigm for which there are many standards around
already, yet their conceptual underpinnings are still in their infancy. The
latter include, among others, quality of service (QoS) aspects, and the
derivation of a service specification from a given workflow (or process)
model.
Keywords: process modelling, workflows, Web services
