This glossary explains how terms are used on this site. The main pages still introduce them where they first appear.
Business-process management
The practice of organising, carrying out and improving work across people and systems. The abbreviation is BPM.
Case
A collection of related information and work whose route may change as facts and human decisions emerge.
Claim
The action by which an eligible person accepts responsibility for a work item.
Command
A request asking a component to perform an authorised action, such as creating or completing work.
Correlation identifier
A shared identifier that links related requests, events and work history across components. It helps support staff follow one journey.
Escalation
A recorded change that brings overdue, blocked or higher-risk work to another role or action.
Event
A record reporting a state change that the component has accepted, such as a work item being claimed.
Idempotency
The property that retrying the same request does not create another copy of its effect. Sending one creation request twice should still create one work item.
Open BPM
A reactivated programme developing open reference components for work, case, workflow and decision management. The new component has not yet been built.
Operational telemetry
Measurements and logs used to understand software health, performance, retries and failures. It is not the durable history of the business work.
Process
A repeatable sequence of activities used when the route is known well enough to define in advance.
Queue
A view of available work that a defined group or role may act on. A work item in a queue has not necessarily been claimed by one person.
Reference component
An open implementation intended to demonstrate one component role and provide a concrete option that others can use, replace or compare. The Open BPM reference component is proposed.
Work history
The durable record of accepted work changes, including the actor, authority, time, request and result.
Work item
A named unit of work with a required result, current state, responsible role and history.