What is Work Distribution

This chapter discusses the challenges associated with integrating work performed by human agents into automated workflows. It briefly recounts the evolution of business process support systems and concludes that although the support for people integration continues to evolve in these offerings, in broad terms it has not advanced markedly since their inception several decades ago. Nevertheless, people are an integral part of business processes and integration of human work deserves special consideration during process design and deployment. To this end, the chapter explores the requirements associated with modelling human integration and examines the support for people integration offered by WS-BPEL, which (together with its WS-BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask extensions) currently represents the state of the art when defining and implementing business processes in a service-oriented environment. In order to do this, it utilises a common framework for language assessment, the workflow resource patterns, both to illustrate the capabilities of WS-BPEL and to identify future technical opportunities.