Difference between BPM and Workflow

Question

What is the difference between BPM and Workflow ?

Also, between BPEL and ESB ?

Answer 1

BPM is a discipline called Business Process Management, it's not about technology. You will find BPM Systems or Suites which are software that guides you to implement the different stages of the BPM discipline. This term is not technical is more Business Oriented.

The term Workflow is used on conjunction with BPM, but it was originally intended to describe Human To Human interactions in Document oriented companies and scenarios. The term Business Process represent more generic situations where systems and human actors interact to achieve a goal. This term can also be used outside the technical arena.

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is a standard also known as WS-BPEL which defines the interactions between systems, using an XML format. This standard was widely adopted by a lot of companies to define their systems to systems interactions (one of the big things against BPEL was the lack of support for the Human Interactions). This is an extremely technical thing, because it's about how to integrate systems that are exposed via web services (provides a web service endpoint to interact.)

An ESB is an Enterprise Service Bus, ESBs are commonly used to integrate different systems. The main idea is to provide a set of business connectors that allows different applications to interact under different protocols and technologies.

I suggest you to take a look at BPMN2 (Business Process Modeling and Notation 2) which is the new standard adopted by most of the BPM Systems nowadays. Check www.jbpm.org for more information.

Cheers