Always Stay Flexible! WfMS-independent Business Process Controlling in SOA

Abstract

Nowadays, businesses need to change their operational processes in a ?exible and agile manner to keep the competitive edge. The fruitful combination of SOA (beyond'only' Web Services / BPEL based SOA implementations)and WfMS can be used to run business processes through the 'orchestration' of services with business value. However, work?ow applications (WfApp) often use proprietary interfaces from WfMS resulting in a tight coupling between both. If the WfMS has to change that easily becomes a critical cost factor. Beside service orchestration a continuous process optimizationis crucial. This requires business process controlling (BPC)that provides a substantial contribution to the competitiveness of enterprises. We thus address two problems: Firstly, we present an integration architecture that decouples a WfApp from the underlying WfMS. Secondly, BPC components are integrated into the architecture, which are based on a data warehouse and a service ('BPC logger') to record business objects. A prototypic implementation using a standardized insurance process validates the results.