A Services Lifecycle to Support the Business Processes Lifecycle: From Modeling to Execution and Beyond

The realization of business process with services has gain more importance in the last decade. Several organizations are focusing nowadays in the modeling and execution of their business processes, seizing the advantages provided by both the BPMN 2.0 notation which allows these models to be executed, and the emergence of BPMS platforms which are able to execute business processes invoking internal and external services from partners and/or the cloud when needed. Although many lifecycle proposals exist to guide the definition and management of both business process and services, there is no clear relationship defined between them, i.e. how services should be defined and managed to support business processes. This is a key element that should be taken into account when implementing services for this kind of systems, in order to systematize the work and obtain better results. In this paper we present a service lifecycle to support business processes, which helps developing services for business process systems.