BPEL & Humans

BPEL is said to be designed for orchestration of web services. Some say BPEL is competent and suitable for business process implementations, but not for human workflows. I've also read that BPEL lacks in the way it orchestrates human interaction with business processes. I think one should separate those two scenarios from each other since they will have different impact on the critisism.

First, BPEL cannot describe a human workflow and I don't agree. A business process contains a flow with several descions on the way forward. A human workflow is the same where the flow is central, except that humans makes the descisions them self (in their head based on facts in that very moment). A business process will make a descision based on predefined rules. Where a BPEL process goes to a Rules Engine to make descision for a business process, a human workflow asks a human. The human is responding through web services.

Secondly, BPEL cannot communicate with humans. BPEL use partner links for inter communication, where a partner link is pointing out a web service endpoint. Yes, it's an endpoint and not a human, but behind the endpoint there can be a human. Some say humans are resource when someone asks for a role. The same thing can be said about web services. A web service interface is a role, where the running instance is the resource. Allocation of resources is handled by resource management tools in the same way as SOA tools handles service management.

I'm sorry, I can't see why humans are different when it comes to processes and services.