Business Process Management: State-of-the-Art, Trends, Open Issues

Umeshwar Dayal
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA
dayal@hpl.hp.com

Abstract

As the Web evolves from providing information access into a platform for e-business, there is a need for modeling and automating inter-business interactions. Over the past decade, there has been a lot of work in developing middleware for integrating and automating enterprise business processes. Today, there is renewed interest in extending these systems to manage inter-organizational processes. This paper provides a historical perspective on technologies for intra- and inter-enterprise business processes, reviews the state of the art, and exposes some open research issues. We include a discussion of process-based coordination, and corresponding products and standards activities. We provide an overview of the rather extensive work that has been done on process modeling, including advanced transaction models for business processes, and an overview of the fledgling area of business process intelligence.

Note: This is a revised version of an invited talk at VLDB 2001 and a keynote talk at the ER 2001 conference.