Belocolus

I have to point to this from Sean McGrath if for no other reason than it uses the term "belocolus".

But there's also some content worth quoting...

Your problems lie in two fundamental concepts that need to be central to how you think about business processes in a distributed world - (a) event driven execution and (b) temporal decoupling.

My problems lie in some other fundamental problems of the enterprise. Nevertheless this quote above is a good one to keep in mind before suffering a vendor or buzzword headspin.

More from the in-depth article...

Are you one of those companies we are constantly told about that is making great headway with Web Services behind the firewall? If so, I suggest you taken a close look at the amount of temporal coupling implied by your model. Remember: upside down is the right way up.