As a business evolves, the number of systems used to run the business increases. This can be either through continued development
of the IT strategy, or acquisition of other companies with different systems. For any business there is a real requirement
to link these systems. Web services and Web service orchestration offer a secure, accessible, scalable and future-proof mechanism
for system communication. This linking of disparate systems within a company’s IT strategy contributes towards a key SOA strategy.
Generally, a company’s IT strategy is arranged and organised by high-level business managers; not technical IT officers. Due
to the fact that SOA implementations are generally a very technical implementation, business personnel are unable to get heavily
involved in the process at the present time. This paper presents the concepts behind Service Oriented Architectures and Web
service orchestration. A custom software tool for developing SOA strategies via BPEL and Web service orchestration is outlined
towards the end of the paper. Based on an established modelling tool, the SOA add-in is capable of producing complex SOA strategies
for a company’s IT department. This tool is pitched at a sufficient level for semi-technical business managers to be able
to utilise it in an efficient manner. This moves away from the traditional low-level design being carried out by highly skilled
IT professionals. We also discuss potential future improvements to the BPEL standard.
Keywords Web Service - BPEL - WSDL - SOA - model checking