Always Stay Flexible! WfMS-independent Business Process Controlling in SOA

Nowadays, businesses need to change their operational processes in a flexible and agile manner to keep the competitive edge. The fruitful combination of SOA (beyond´only´ Web Services / BPEL based SOA implementations)and WfMS can be used to run business processes through the ´orchestration´ of services with business value. However, workflow applications (WfApp) often use proprietary interfaces from WfMS resulting in a tight coupling between both. If the WfMS has to change that easily becomes a critical cost factor. Beside service orchestration a continuous process optimizationis crucial. This requires business process controlling (BPC)that provides a substantial contribution to the competitiveness of enterprises. We thus address two problems: Firstly, we present an integration architecture that decouples a WfApp from the underlying WfMS. Secondly, BPC components are integrated into the architecture, which are based on a data warehouse and a service (´BPC logger´) to record business objects. A prototypic implementation using a standardized insurance process validates the results.