In striking and refreshing contrast to other guest editorials (barely reiterating paper abstracts), this editorial gives a lucid and concise introduction to the domain of business process management (BPM).

It starts by defining the most important domain concepts: business process management systems (BPMS), workflow management systems (WFMS), BPM, workflow management (WFM), and business activity management (BAM), and also explores the (subtle) differences between workflow management and business process management systems. Personally, I would have also welcomed a definition of a “process” and a “business process,” which, interestingly, are not presented by the authors.

The article then explores the current status and trends in BPM in the following areas: redesigning operational processes (straight-through processing and case handling); decomposition of BPM into the four individual stages of design, modeling, analysis, and enactment; and the lack of standardization in the BPM area, including recent Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based Web services approaches (for example, business process execution language for Web services (BPEL4WS)). This last section, however, seems slightly unbalanced to me, concentrating solely on the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). The introduction of the four papers of the special issue only accounts for one page of the article.

Given the rapid development of the field, the reader might want to know that the article presents the state of affairs as of (approximately) June 2003. While I am not aware of any significant change to the article’s views as of today, this may change, literally, overnight. In all other respects, I wholeheartedly recommend the article as a brief overview of scientific and practical issues in the context of BPM systems.