Abstract
The intention of this paper is to present, in a nutshell, important contributing developments of the last decade that have resulted in a better understanding of applications and technologies needed for present-day service incarnations. We start from process modelling and management, which has its origins in the early 1990s, and which has paved the way for a new understanding of business dynamics and interactions. Technically, process modelling has first led to workflow management, in an attempt to (further) automate internal and external process executions. Yet what is well-understood by now is that process modelling alone is not sufficient, but needs to be complemented by an adequate process management. Once processes and workflows are in place, a common desire nowadays is their outsourcing, and this is a typical situation where Web services enter the picture. Services can also be seen as yet another approach to application integration, whose history has included such diverse directions as remote procedure call (RPC), object-oriented middleware and brokering, or application service provisioning (ASP). Web services have recently emerged as a primarily industrial paradigm for which there are many standards around already, yet their conceptual underpinnings are still in their infancy. The latter include, among others, quality of service (QoS) aspects, and the derivation of a service specification from a given workflow (or process) model.