Web services and process management: A union of convenience or a new area of research?

Two recent trends are reshaping the research landscape in business process management. One such trend is the adoption of process-driven application integration by major e-business middleware vendors, and the other is the advancement of web services as a universal computing platform. In this paper, we investigate the impact of web services on business process technologies and present our viewpoints on research directions in business management in the presence of web services. Finally, we introduce the papers published in the Special Issue on Web Service and Process Management.