Thinking about Process and Workflow…

A while ago I blogged some various points about SOA that some people thought was interesting. Lets try the same with workflow:

• Like SOA, the workflow model is fractal.  Activities within a workflow may contain other activities which, in turn, may be a part of another workflow (perhaps it really is turtles all the way down).
• Each participant in a global choreography model has public and private views of their role in the model.  
• There is no "conductor" within a global choreography model.
• Hierarchical state machines manage and track the state of each participant's view of the global choreography model.   The state machines rely upon message-based communications, not RPC mechanisms.  State machines include entry and exit guards that may trigger additional messaging.
• Process compensation is not a silver bullet for exception handling.  Put more simply, there is no such thing as a "roll back" in a business process.  Sometimes compensation is simply not enough.

More to come.