A white paper discussing business processes and business services focusing on how behavior of a service may be realized as a behavior of a process.

The word 'process' has a certain magnetism – it is used everywhere in business and technology irrespective to its applicability; people believe it is a shame if one does not have a process, he or she does not know how to work. Well, is this true? Is everything we do a business process?

While a business process is a great help for operational activities, it also can be a great obstacle if applied stubbornly, simply because it worked before. Indeed, “before” we worked in a different business execution context and had different goals; without special feasibility studies, there are no guarantees that the business process used before is the right way of doing the job nowadays. Moreover, we know that a lot of our activities are not pre-defined, ordered and repeated, i.e. they cannot be embedded into a business process.

In this paper, Michael Poulin will demonstrate to business process managers, designers and business organization planners that the meta-models of business process and business services are the same from the outside-in view and that a behavior of a service may be realized as a behavior of a process.