First things first: In this chapter, we’ll dive into what process orchestration is, explore how it differs from process automation, and make a compelling business case for using it. As you’ll see, there are very different types of processes that you can automate, and this influences how you build solutions in a big way. While this is not surprising at all, it is surprisingly often ignored in real life.
Process Orchestration in the Context of Automation
Automation is a big field. This book concentrates specifically on the automation of processes, and even more specifically on the (automated) orchestration of tasks (rather than on the automation of the tasks themselves). Figure I.1 visualizes this relationship. As the distinction can be a little confusing, we’ll emphasize it once more – while process automation and task automation are closely related to process orchestration, they are not the same:
Task automation is the use of technology to automatically perform certain tasks without human intervention.
Process orchestration is the coordination of the different tasks of a process, both automated and manual.
Process automation is a mix of process orchestration and task automation to automate a process, where the degree of automation can vary.
Figure I.1 Process orchestration in the context of automation.
Process orchestration is often compared to the role of a ...
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