BPEL4People Promises to Unjam Process Workflows

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June 28, 2007

BPEL4People Promises to Unjam Process Workflows

Does Business Process Execution Language lack the "human touch"? Some industry leaders say that BPEL is too automation-centric, and lacks support for human interaction with the workflow. However, not everyone agrees on the best way to resolve the matter.

Process workflows are like the rivers that dot the planet; each one has its own unique sources and tributary streams, terrains to be travailed, and eventually emptying out somewhere, be it an ocean, bay, larger river, or lake. But there are also plenty of waterfalls, dams and locks on the way. Workflows are as unique as the companies that create them, and all have their own points where humans intercede.

Responding to such concerns, a couple of years back, IBM and SAP put forth an extension to BPEL called BPEL4People, intended to be "layered on top of BPEL as specification" describing a proposed extension to BPEL, intended to cover a "broad range of scenarios that involves people within business processes."

As the IBM-SAP white paper explained it, "during the lifetime of a long-running business process, conditions that require human involvement can occur. An example of this would be if a process is stuck because no one has been assigned to perform a particular task. Another example would be if a process waits for input from human participants or Web services, and the input must be collected within a certain number of hours. If the timeout occurs, a user must be notified to decide how the process should proceed."

As BPEL exists today, getting a process "unstuck" would "require undoing parts of the business process. But if the business process has already run for multiple days, invoking partner operations, collecting results, and so on, compensation may not be desirable, since this wastes resources and efforts already spent." Thus an administrator will have to manually intervene to take the corrective action to get the process moving again.

BPEL needs to incorporate a "special kind of implementation of an activity - a communication step which may be called 'people activity.'" The paper defines people activities, simply, as "tasks performed by users," noting "there are scenarios where it is desirable to define which people are eligible to start a certain business process."

This week, IBM and SAP were joined by Active Endpoints, Adobe, and Oracle in the publication of the BPEL4People specifications, which define an approach for integrating human interactions using Web Services Business Process Execution Language ( WS-BPEL ) 2.0.

ebizQ colleague Michael Dortch has just posted his observations about BPEL4People, noting that the spec "could bridge and significantly narrow the gap between service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and the humans attempting to use the services to do work that makes the business go."

Michael says the prospects for BPEL4People are promising, but cautions that "the vendors supporting BPEL4People have to do three things, and they have to do them quickly, transparently, and well." This includes attracting more vendors to the fold, delivering products that actually use BPEL4People, and third, make it an official OASIS industry standard.

We are only in the early stages of automating business process management, and have only begun linking business processes to SOA. Processes get touched many times, and sometimes are required to be by law or regulation. BPEL promises to speed up much of our workflows, but the points requiring human interaction may negate efficiency and speed gains. The question is whether BPEL4People - or other approaches - can compensate for the human equation.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us