Chapter 5 - Business Process Management

Abstract

A business process is a set of related tasks that lead to a particular goal. Some business processes automate the execution or tracking of tasks using software. The term workflow is a commonly used synonym for the concept of a business process. The term business transaction is sometimes used as a synonym for a business process or a step within a business process. Business process management is the activity of creating, managing, adapting, and monitoring business processes. Like any application program, a business process needs to be specified in a formal language. This can be an imperative language with the usual control flow constructs, a finite state machine, or a graphical notation suitable for a visual programming tool. Usually a business process is supported by a special-purpose runtime system. The business process runtime needs to log all the interesting events that occur in a process that affect the process's state. The runtime system needs to offer functions for saving the state of a business process, if the process is idle or in anticipation of a failure, and for restoring the state when the process becomes active again or recovers from a failure. A business process needs to pay special attention to maintaining state in a way that avoids interpreting the result of a partially executed process and that can interpret that state when invoking compensating transactions to cope with the failure of a partially executed process.