Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

2.1. WHAT IS A BUSINESS PROCESS?

Every business exists to provide some kind of value. The most common recipient of this value can be customers, partners, shareholders, and employees. The most common forms of value are goods, information, services, share price, and dividend. A business carries out a sequence of tasks to produce a specific value. This collection of tasks, their sequence, and the roles and responsibilities surrounding these tasks are collectively called a business process.

A business process achieves a goal that the business cares about. This is called the output of the process. A business process begins to execute when a certain event takes place. For example, when a customer returns a product in a retail store, the process to deal with that return begins to execute. Some of the tasks in the process may need to know certain information. For example, in the return handling process, if a task needs to increment the inventory on hand, it needs to know the SKU number of the product that has been returned. Such information is called input to the process.

In summary, then, these are the various components of a business process:

• Trigger event. This starts a business process.

• Input to the process. This might be information, goods, or contracts that must exist before the process can begin.

• Tasks that need to be carried out. The tasks can be performed by people, machine, or software. Roles and responsibilities around these tasks are well defined. Just like a process, a task ...