The Mad Men had their presentation. The CIO was impressed and decided to buy the Orchestration System™. After all it promised to remove the programming tasks from the organization leaving mere process configuration to do whenever changes were required. And the business changes constantly. Everyone knows that. The deal was signed and the license fee calling to mind a phone number was paid to the vendor. The system was installed from the DVD. The Business Managers configured the business processes. Everything was ready to just switch it all to production.
But the slideware promises did not quite hold. The orchestration system was just a tabula rasa: an empty development environment and a runtime engine. It was also a closed system that only a few people in the world knew how to master compared to standard open technologies like the ones behind REST interfaces.
The configuration task that was the responsibility of the Business Managers turned out to be a programming task they had no skills to handle. And a programming task to be accomplished with a visual programming language inferior not only to any contemporary development platform but also to anything from the 1970's. A development platform offering no mechanisms for proper composition to modules or layers of abstraction. And therefore there were no third party libraries of any kind whatsoever either.
The source code was saved in XML and thus was incomprehensible to any version control system around. All testing had to be done in a full blown live environment and manually as there was no support for unit testing of components. Remember: the system did not support any composition so there were no units to test. No automated tests means also no continuous integration.
But it is now the date that we have to go to production. So we can read from the Gantt Chart of the Project Manager. It is also the milestone to make the fat bonus tied to the project. So we turn on the system. And this is what we hear: Business Process Orchestration - The Original Soundtrack.
I hope that whenever anyone hears the words "Business Process Orchestration" this "Business Process Orchestration - The Original Soundtrack" starts to play in their heads. Many lives would be saved. Please help me to accomplish this altruistic task by playing this soundtrack whenever someone mentions the O word!
