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Putting People Before BPEL


A cadre of companies collaborating to extend language for human involvement

By David Worthington
July 27, 2007 — 
Automated business processes contain a paradox. How can a process be automated at those points where people are involved? Many general-purpose business processes cannot be executed without human interaction, making it inherently more difficult to model processes with Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). A group of vendors have dubbed their solution to this problem “BPEL4People,” but its impact is a matter for debate.

BPEL is a business process modeling language that provides an executable model based on Web services. BPEL 2.0 was approved by OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, in April, and vendors are already trying to plug the gaps it leaves in the areas where humans interact.

Active Endpoints, Adobe Systems, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle and SAP are collaborating to extend BPEL to support a broad range of human interaction patterns, extending its modeling capabilities. Diane Jordan, program director for IBM emerging Internet software standards, said that the impetus for a common effort was that BPEL implementations were diverging along this line, and vendors were tempted to address the problem with stopgap proprietary extensions.

The BPEL4People specifications—two specifications that build on the BPEL language—were published on June 25. WS-BPEL Extension for People defines how to describe human tasks in a BPEL process. The tasks may be incorporated as components in BPEL process definitions.

The complementary specification, WS-HumanTask, defines the characteristics of human tasks, including the behaviors and operations used to manipulate them. Jordan explained that WS-HumanTask addresses process structures that the vendors have seen while working with customers, resulting in five distinct process-task interaction patterns.

IBM WebSphere Process Server already implements both WS-HumanTask and the WS-BPEL Extension for People.

According to Jordan, the parties will submit the specification to OASIS by the fall. OASIS would then begin work to draft a charter and form a technical committee—if it accepts the specifications.

“It’s becoming increasingly critical to understand and support human interactions when modeling business processes,” said Gartner research director Charles Abrams. “The publication of these specifications is a substantial step in bridging human and IT interactions within the WS-BPEL language.”

Bruce Silver, principal analyst at Bruce Silver Associates, a group of BPM and content advisers, demurred, writing in an article published at BPMInstitute.org that BPEL4People was unlikely to succeed. Silver explained that the interaction patterns that a BPMS must support in order to be BPEL4People-compliant were overly ambitious, and unlikely to be adopted outside of IBM and SAP.


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