Chapter 5. Short and Long-Running Processes

As a process moves from activity to activity, it consumes time, and each activity adds to the overall duration. But different sorts of activities have different durations, and it's not uncommon to observe a ten-step process that outpaces, say, a five-step one. It depends, of course, on what those activities are doing.

In SOA, process cycle times range from one second or less to one or more years! The latter sort need not have a large number of activities. The pyramids might have been built rock-by-rock over several decades, but protracted SOA processes typically span only a few dozen tasks, a handful of which consume almost the entire interval.