Phil Wainewright has a mention of “personal service builders” and business process management, in the context of web services and the emerging SOA (services-oriented architecture). A few quotes to get one thinking:
Proponents of next-generation business process management (BPM) talk about allowing business users to directly manipulate process automation within the enterprise.
o the business, the PC loaded with a spreadsheet meant a radical simplification of routine calculations, transferring to the everyday businessperson a function that had once required special programming skills. Today, a similar symbiotic relationship is emerging between web services and BPM … What the spreadsheet did for numerical computation BPM will do for process work. (Howard Smith and Peter Fingar)
I see Personal Service Builders (PSBs) as the desktop element of the emerging trend in on-demand assembly of process automation.
I need to put these ideas together in the context of the things we are doing on the eBusiness suite…will write a more detailed post soon.
