Past few months saw an increased interest in business process management (BPM), first from the release of BPML by BPMI.org and then from BPEL4WS, WS-Tx and WS-Coordination by IBM and Microsoft. Before getting overwhelmed by waves of acronyms and their revisions, innoculate yourself with a review paper "Business Process Coordination: State of the Art, Trends, and Open Issues" by Umeshwar Dayal, Meichun Hsu, Rivka Ladin from VLDB 2001. The authors were given "Ten Years Award" for their VLDB 1991 paper judged to be the most influencial paper over the decade since original publication: "A Transactional Model for Long-Running Activities".

Modelling business processes as long transactions and workflows is one valid and useful approach. As pointed out in Contours however, it is not the only one. Other orthogonal approaches may include semantic web and agents (whose pedigree and history are another long transaction of computer science research and industry). More notes on these are forthcoming.