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Reviewer: David Gary Hill

A business process consists of a coordinated set of activities that focus on a realizable business goal. Business process management (BPM) includes the concepts, methods, and techniques that apply at some point in the business process life cycle. A business process management system (BPMS) is a generic software system that coordinates the fulfillment of business processes through explicit process representations. Information technology (IT) professionals and project managers, as well as computer science (CS) students who need a formal presentation of the concepts, languages, and architectures that are required for a BPMS will find this book to be a valuable resource. The book delves into the necessary and comprehensive level of detail with clarity. Part 1 focuses on the foundations of BPM. The introductory chapter provides an overview of BPM, including definitions, the business process life cycle, and classification of business processes. The next chapter, on the evolution of enterprise system architectures, introduces a number of salient topics, such as enterprise application integration and workflow management. Part 2, on business process modeling, consists of four chapters, and is the heart as well as the bulk of the book. Chapter 3, on the foundation for business process modeling, introduces a large number of topics, including activity models; process models, along with the necessary notation and modeling process data; and architecture and process execution environments. Chapter 4 covers process orchestration, which is the centralized control of the ordering of activities in a BPMS. The chapter introduces the basics of process orchestration, such as Petri nets, event-driven process chains, and workflow nets, before diving into some detail with a discussion of Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) and what it can do. The chapter concludes with a discussion of business process modeling notation. Chapter 5 turns to the subject of process choreographies, which is the process of managing the intersection of a set of business processes through the sending and receiving of messages, rather than a central agent. Choreographies play a key role in ensuring interoperability between process orchestrations between businesses where business-to-business collaboration is essential. Many design and implementation issues are discussed. Part 2 concludes with a discussion of the properties of business processes, including a section on structural soundness. This section has a number of subsections that have the intriguing names of "Relaxed Soundness," "Weak Soundness," and "Lazy Soundness." Part 3 consists of two chapters that cover architectures and methodologies. Chapter 7 covers BPM architectures, including workflow management architectures, Web services and their composition, advanced service composition, and data-driven processes. The concluding chapter on business process methodology briefly discusses issues of strategy and organization, as well as platform selection, implementation, and testing. All in all, the book presents a comprehensive discussion of BPM that should be valuable to the reader. For a book such as this, an extensive number of diagrams that clearly illustrate the subjects discussed is a necessity; Weske delivers successfully on this requirement. However, a glossary would be a valuable addition to the next edition. Online Computing Reviews Service