I am quite honored that the authors of this book asked me if I could write the foreword. They have a long and concrete experience in implementing business processes, and we have interacted together in the context of telecommunication operators, where they delivered successful business process implementation.

What I would like to share here is some practices I came to after driving many business process management and service-oriented architecture projects. Many of my customers are still trying to find how to implement processes and what technology they should use. In fact, the answer is a palette of techniques that need to be applied in the best combination. So let me try to give some clues about ways that succeed.

To BPEL or not to BPEL, that is the question.

There have been long debates about whether agile enterprises could drive the way they do business in an orchestrated fashion, where a maestro drives all of the interactions, or if the enterprise should act as a choreographed dancing team, where each dancer implements their part of the choreography. As such, the partition of the orchestra was used as an analogy for describing the purpose of language that described processes such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

What has been missed in the orchestration analogy is that BPEL only orchestrates business service requests, but does not preclude the way the services will be executed. In a sense, BPEL is like musicians in an orchestra deciding what they could use to play their part, such as using a recorded musical part. We can easily say that the orchestration analogy does not really fit with services and neither does choreography.