Chapter 9 - Integrating Human Services

Summary

INTRODUCTION

An objective of business services orchestration (BSO) is to remove or minimize human intervention that is not justified by business considerations. This is driven by the motivation to reduce swivel-chair operation, thereby reducing latency between activities, and to minimize errors. However, human intervention is sometimes extremely necessary. For example, let us consider a scenario in which a procurement request is entered into the system. Because of legal ramifications and internal policies, a human has to approve and digitally sign the request. Because we view everything in the service-oriented architecture as a first-class service, we view human participation as a service that is provided by people, similar to the service provided by a software application.

BSO sees human participation in a process as a service. This view of human services is germane to true BSO. It's not capricious. The reason for this level of abstraction is that the ultimate goal of any BSO implementation is to replace routine, repeatable services from people with services from applications that automate them. When human participation in a process is treated by the process as a service invocation, it becomes transparent to the process whether the service is from a human or from an application. In fact, it is always from a human through an application anyway.

The standard application component of a BSO suite that is used to invoke services from people is the work portal.