OASIS recently announced formation of a new technical committee for BPEL4People. WS-BPEL 2.0 (or BPEL for short), the current version, does not address participation of people in business processes. This is one indication that BPEL isn't designed for business users. It's designed for programmers, and BPEL4People won't change that. A true business process language must be designed to represent business processes that make sense for the business and can be, in some cases, implemented manually, as well with a BPMS (Business Process Management System). A business process language also must support SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). As asserted by Joe McKendrick, "BPM and SOA Need Each Other.".

BPEL may be acceptable for specification of processes that are internal to computer systems, but the design of BPEL forces a structure on business processes that is unnatural for business people.  A business process designed by business users must be either constrained or transformed for a BPEL implementation. Today, if a transformed process is presented back to the business users, they probably won't recognize it, even if it is presented in a graphical form rather than the standard XML representation (BPEL doesn't have a standard graphical representation).

In addition, BPEL does not address invocation of independent sub-processes or choreography. These are fundamental requirements for SOA. Use of independent sub-processes allows a business process to use a sub-process that is independently developed and shared with other processes-potentially a shared service. A choreography specification defines an exchange protocol between two or more business entities engaged in a business transaction. Choreography is defined by ebXML BP (also from OASIS) or by WS-CDL (from W3C), but there is no defined relationship between BPEL and either of these choreography languages.  When business entities agree on a choreography, it is important that they have support for designing their internal processes to complement the intended choreography.

BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation from OMG) was specifically designed for graphical representation of business processes for business people, and it has been widely adopted by the industry. BPMN already has tasks for people and support for independent sub-processes.  BPMN is now supported by BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel also from OMG) with a computational model that extends BPMN to address choreography and support enterprise-level modeling of business processes including support for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

BPDM defines the integration of orchestration (internal business processes) with choreography (the exchange protocol) allowing each to also stand on its own, so an internal business process can complement multiple choreographies, and a choreography can be supported by different business entities, each with their own internal processes. BPDM with BPMN provide the modeling capability needed to design business processes in a SOA context and with enterprise scale.

Thus BPDM supports the convergence of BPM and SOA that is suggested by Bruce Silver in "The Phony War between BPM and SOA." This convergence will put business people back in control. Bruce notes the discomfort of IT people with the business taking control of its business processes. But it must not stop there; the business also must take control of the definition of services. IT people must support the business in the design of the business incorporating both BPM and SOA disciplines and tools. Those enterprises that realize the synergy of these disciplines and leverage the technology will be able to achieve both the efficiency and flexibility needed to remain competitive in an increasingly dynamic world.