VOSibilities

Well, this is my first real “content” post and I am about to challenge no less than eminent industry notable and EDS Fellow Fred Cummins, who recently took the opportunity to declare BPEL4People dSOAoa (pronounced d-SEW-ah-oh-ah and meaning “Dead SOA on arrival”).

I am not sure if Fred’s problem core problem is with BPEL4People as much as it is with BPEL itself, which he dismisses as “for programmers.” But it’s clear he doesn’t think much of either standard, favoring instead BPMN. And I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the one who can specifically refute many of his technical arguments.

But I do know one thing: being “for programmers” when it comes to standards-based workflow ain’t a bad thing. That’s because from my relatively non-technical perspective, two things have always been true about workflow systems. First, the support for them in programming languages has been abominable and, second, every single end-user workflow system that has ever been tried has been a failure.

If the charge is “BPEL (and therefore BPEL4People) is a programming language,” then my counter-charge is that BPMN is about non-executable pretty pictures. Wikipedia says, “The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a standard notation that is readily understandable by all business stakeholders…”

Pretty diagrams do not a business application make.

In short, workflow is something that has to be developed into an application, not “specified” by some end-user on a canvas. That’s because while you can expect a developer to be capable of understanding the workflow process and adapting it to the application, you can be certain an end-user won’t be able to integrate his or her expert-level knowledge of the business process into a database or transaction system.

One area I suspect Fred and I agree on, though, is the need for standards. Another reason workflow has been ineffective in business applications is that business are loathe to lock up their processes in proprietary formats. What BPEL4People and BPMN offer users is the opportunity to free themselves from proprietary workflow engines, which is surely a good thing.

Tags: BPEL, bpel4people, BPMN, vos

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under BPEL, VOS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.