The gap between BPM (business process management) and SOA just narrowed a bit today with the joint announcement of a new Web services specification, BPEL4People. Several years in the making, the specification has a lineup of all-stars promoting it, including Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP. Possibly the silliest-named spec since TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), the new standard augments WS-BPEL (Web services business process execution language) with human workflow capabilities.That’s good news, because plain old WS-BPEL, even in its recent 2.0 iteration, is much better as an orchestration language for creating composite applications than it was for developing workflow apps. Not that developers weren’t doing interesting stuff with WS-BPEL by itself; some, including Annrai O’Toole of CapeClear, see WS-BPEL as a model for the next generation of programming languages, as enterprise developers focus more and more on creating process-oriented applications that execute long-running transactions across multiple platforms.But people have a way of inserting themselves in long, complicated processes, and BPEL4People gives developers new ways of modeling behavior so apps don’t break when someone takes a vacation. Part of the BPEL4People spec is Web Services Human Task, which actually provides a means to define human behavior as activities (not all human behavior, we hope). Those activiies will be consumable by BPEL apps and, according to the spec’s authors, other apps as well. Presumably, BPM offerings from the participating vendors (and others) will support BPEL4People, so that process models developed in BPM products will be more than pretty pictures developers use as a guide for building apps — they may actually connect to services in an SOA, shortening development cycles considerably. But all this will take awhile. BPEL4People’s authors plan to submit the spec to OASIS in the “near future,” so years may elapse before the fully blessed spec makes it into commercial products. Technology Industry