Standardization and Agile Business Processes

We show that it is crucial for the support of business processes and intelligence as well as for the technical advantages that the peers (services) in service-oriented systems have user-oriented interfaces. Such a requirement is at present difficult to implement if we require that the interfaces must be completely implemented according to world-wide standards - i.e. no proprietary (ad hoc) solutions are allowed. The reason is that the user-oriented interfaces must be implemented as semi-formal interfaces inspired by the interfaces of real-world services and therefore must be ultimatively based on the knowledge domains, domain languages, and even of the domain habits and local cultures of users. We further show that there are at least for the time being technical reasons why it is not feasible to standardize such interfaces fully as there is a danger that the hurried standardization of the interfaces can lead to many premature cumbersome standards not to be well usable. We propose a solution of this problem. Our proposal is supported by the observed tendency of modern service-oriented systems to use XML-based proprietary interface languages and SOAP-message encoding instead of the SOAP-RPC one.