The need for processes

Processes are everywhere: every act we are doing, every task a computer is realizing, is generally part of a larger group of actions that contribute to reaching a given objective. As such, even the simplest information system, such as the one we created for our sample DemoEditor organization, contains processes. Of course, some are very small and not worth describing (an editor changing the address of an author, for example). However some of them bear lots of value for the organization, and special care needs to be taken when using them. Those are the ones we are going to deal with in this chapter because they are generally the ones that are implemented using software, in order to make them quicker or to ensure a perfectly repeatable way of running them.

Orchestration and choreography

As a quick reminder before we dive into specific processes and show how they can be integrated into the information system, there are two main ways to implement a process...