Professional IBM WebSphere 5.0 Application Server; excerpted from Chapter 10: Enterprise Process Management. (Book Excerpt).

Professional IBM WebSphere 5.0 Application Server provides a perspective on the philosophy and rationale behind WebSphere Application Server, taking readers through the programming and deployment model and familiarizing them with the WebSphere Studio Application Developer tool set. The book explains how to use the application server to build business applications, and how to integrate businesses. The following excerpt is from Chapter l0 on Enterprise Process Management and introduces the concept of Process Choreography as a mechanism for mare efficiently creating, running, and changing business processes.

In the early '90s, many companies invested in traditional client/server architectures by building fat-client applications with rich graphics that offloaded legacy-system processing time.

Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is about modeling, implementing and managing the execution of automated business processes. Automated means that the process is driven by an application that orchestrates the interaction of the various human resources and software components which are required to perform the business process. With a few "green field" exceptions, BPM application development generally is a "meet-in-the-middle" process, which comprises these two elements:

* A high-level requirements specification of the business functions that an enterprise wants to offer or perform to achieve a business goal within certain constraints (cost and time limits, quality of service, and so on). Often this requirements specification is derived from the results of a more or less formal business process analysis effort. In other cases, the functions to be provided are dictated by public standards or external partners. In any case, the process specifications are likely to change frequently.

* A set of existing application components that encapsulate …