Businesses consist of processes and strive for excellence in business processes. There are different communities addressing business processes, each with its own objectives, tools and terminology-business process reengineering, business process modeling, business process management, workflow execution, and even current strands of service oriented architecture. In concrete business process projects, we are still faced again and again with similar questions: Which decomposition mechanism to use? Which is the correct granularity for business process activities? Which implementing technology is optimal in a given situation? This book offers an approach to the systematization of the field. It provides a landscape of rationales and concepts for business process tools and technologies. The message of the book is that currently emerging integrated business process platforms are the enabling technology of the future, which will allow us to use the huge potential for automation in today's enterprises. Business Process Technology by Dirk Draheim is the first book to successfully combine an in-depth scientific examination of business process automation principles with a highly practical explanation of the business process technologies, solutions and packages offered by the big industrial players. As such, it provides the foundation for a truly fundamental unification of today's business process automation technologies and lays out a formally underpinned roadmap for their use, evolution and integration. Prof. Dr. Colin Atkinson, Software Engineering Group, University of Mannheim, Germany --Book Jacket.