Two Roles of Processes in SOA

In business processes, the synergy between BPM and SOA is well known and is explained in a number of publications. However, the distinction between business processes that orchestrate services in the context of cross-application, long-lived, human-centric workflows, in contrast to processes orchestrating services in the context of a single short-lived transaction, is not always understood. Some resources do not explicitly explain the difference, referring to both processes and their roles as business processes. This contributes to the confusion and may lead to creating sub-optimal organizational architecture strategies and the selection of wrong standards and products. This paper explains the difference in SOA between the roles of the two flavors of processes, and proposes a refined layered diagram for SOA Reference Architecture, providing general recommendations for selecting standards and tools.