Business Process Management. A Bird's-Eye View and Research Agenda

Recently, Business Process Management (BPM) has gained a lot of attention both from the academic world and the industrial world. The similarities between workflow management and business process management can make one wonder whether it's all old wine in new bottles. But although there are many similarities and many results from workflow research still apply, recent technological developments have changed the domain in a substantial way, resulting in new opportunities and interesting research questions. The convergence of workflow management and Enterprise Application Integration yields prospects for integrating the organisational view and the engineering or automation view of an information system. Internet technologies such as XML and SOAP offer the potential of massive scalability and interconnectivity. In this paper, we first provide a broad overview of the domain of BPM and identify challenges from a modelling quality perspective. Thereafter, we zoom into the use of web services technology for business processes enactment. Furthermore, we review some obvious and less obvious application domains of business process management and business process enactment. Finally, we suggest a research agenda for BPM, by proposing some open issues.