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Chapter 2
The Language: Rationale and Fundamentals

Nick Russell and Arthur ter Hofstede

2.1 Introduction

The Business Process Management domain has evolved at a dramatic pace over the
past two decades and the notion of the business process has become a ubiquitous part
of the modern business enterprise. Most organizations now view their operations in
terms of business processes and manage these business processes in the same way
as other corporate assets. In recent years, an increasingly broad range of generic
technology has become available for automating business processes. This is part
of a growing trend in the software engineering field throughout the past 40 years,
where aspects of functionality that are potentially reusable on a widespread basis
have coalesced into generic software components. Figure 2.1 illustrates this trend
and shows how software systems have evolved from the monolithic applications of
the 1960s developed in their entirety often by a single development team to today’s
offerings that are based on the integration of a range of generic technologies with
only a small component of the application actually being developed from scratch.
In the 1990s, generic functionality for the automation of business processes
first became commercially available in the form of workflow technology and sub-
sequently evolved in the broader field of business process management systems
(BPMS). This technology alleviated the necessity to develop process support within
applications from scratch and provided a variety of off-the-shelf options on which
these requirements could be based. The demand for this technology was signifi-
cant and it is estimated that by 2000 there were well over 200 distinct workflow
offerings in the market, each with a distinct conceptual foundation. Anticipating the
difficulties that would be experienced by organizations seeking to utilize and inte-
grate distinct workflow offerings, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC),
an industry group formed to advance technology in this area, proposed a standard
reference model for workflow technology with an express desire to seek a common
platform for achieving workflow interoperation.
Although a worthy aim, the proposal met with conceptual difficulties when it
came to specifying the details associated with workflow operation and potential

N. Russell (B )
Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
e-mail: nickr@computer.org

A.H.M. ter Hofstede et al. (eds.), Modern Business Process Automation, 23
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-03121-2 2, c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010