The Emerging Importance of Business Process Standards in the Federal Government
Abstract
Today's world is increasingly defined by one term: Collaboration or the ability to share information easily using the platform of Web services. As commercial organizations evolve to a service-based technology based on application-to-application communications, they require a higher level view of how to develop and implement processes across the enterprise. Workflows tied to the automation of repeatable series of tasks are being replaced by an environment that demands an understanding of processes in the context of systems, services and the resulting task. This trend is being supported by the emergence of three trends in standards in commercial IT: the rise of the Business Process Modeling Notation standard under the OMG, the steady movement toward a services-based IT strategy using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the widespread adoption of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard. All three standards have evolved independently, but are now merging into the IT landscape to offer organizations an unparalleled opportunity to more closely align their systems and processes to their business goals. In the commercial world, these standards are propelling organizations to move from simple workflow applications to an architecture-based paradigm that supports collaboration using Web services. The maturing of these commercial standards comes at a time when defense agencies are moving to a netcentric environment where collaboration is key. These new commercial technologies can play a key role in that evolution. These standards provide the platform to facilitate use of enterprise architectures as a mechanism to facilitate collaboration for these types of decisions, whether in the area of support services, operations or war-fighting. Enterprise architectures can help defense agencies guide their IT strategy, technology investments and process improvement while ensuring their systems and processes align to their goals, mission and capabilities.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 23, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA463264
Entities
People
- Jan Popkin