INTRODUCTION

At this point we expect the reader to be comfortable and familiar with what we call business services, the different classifications, and what we envision to be the future of technology.

In this chapter, we explain what orchestration is by explaining the process of orchestration and then contrasting the resulting paradigm against the integration, automation, collaboration, BPR, and Web services paradigms. Then, we talk about the impact of orchestration on information technology (IT) disciplines and the way we do business.

Without any doubt, orchestration is something that, as of today, only humans can do. It is a creative activity. Furthermore, in today's enterprise, services are being orchestrated on-the-fly. Who is doing this? People are. People request services from other people and/or systems to be able to perform a service for someone else. Among the natural orchestrations that people perform, there are those that are systemic and repetitious, and there are those that are “one-offs.” These systemic, routine orchestrations can be performed by an orchestration engine, relieving people of routine, repetitious tasks. From this perspective, orchestrations consist of capturing the rules and sequences of how and when a person invokes services to render a new one. In other words, orchestration consists of creating an executable process model that implements a new business service by harmonizing preexisting business services and managing their tempo.