A Phased Deployment of a Workflow Infrastructure in the Enterprise Architecture

Many organizations migrate to service-oriented architecture (SOA) since it caters for the demanded flexibility and reusability in information systems. Besides delineating appropriate business services, a mechanism for coordinating these services is needed to support business processes. The current state-of-the-art falls short in realizing that goal since existing standards and software packages tend to neglect existing enterprise architectures. Moreover they assume a central position in the architecture from which they control all services according to prescriptive process models, which makes them rather useless in a realistic setting. Therefore we introduce four dimensions to classify workflow engines that reflect the degree of support for the presented requirements. Subsequently we combine these dimensions to describe a phased roll-out of a solution that fulfills the requirements. That solution is currently deployed at KBC Bank & Insurance Group.