Service-oriented business process systems for knowledge work

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a euphoria surrounding service-oriented architectures (SOA) and web services. While its final impact on the software market remains to be decided, the BPM community -- both industry and academia -- acknowledges SOA as the most recent step towards seamless, model-driven process automation. In parallel, the concept of a service has gained momentum not only from a computing perspective but also as an economic good. Business administration research has addressed this tertiarization intensively with concepts and studies on service marketing and service engineering. Katrina Leyking discusses the integration of those streams of service sciences and develops a framework for service-oriented business process systems that uses service-orientation as a shared design principle of both human and technical capabilities. Thus, it specifically addresses the rise of knowledge work that challenges traditional BPM concepts with more human-driven, collaborative and highly flexible business processes that elude full automation. Complemented by an extensive state-of-the-art analysis, this book provides a detailed methodology for engineering service-oriented process architectures. The author validates the methodology with a prototypical application and demonstration in the industry context of learning management processes. Thus, this book is directed at both practitioners and academics in the fields of business process management, knowledge management and information systems.