The story of XML Web services has been dramatized, thus far, mainly by a single actor. According to the script, this actor -- a document named Purchase Order -- travels from one service to the next, showing credentials and undergoing transformations along the way. When the curtain rings down a business process has been automated, but in an oddly sterile way. Where are the people who issued, approved, and executed the PO? Offstage somewhere, presumably.

In reality, of course, the business process in which the PO is embedded

is intensely social. When you drill down into the entities labeled 'Exception Handling' and 'Compensation' in the BPEL4WS WYSIWYG workflow mapping tool, you find people negotiating, compromising, and finagling. A distributed object system, such as CORBA, can't accommodate these behaviors. Neither can XML Web services, if we construe this technology as just another distributed object system -- CORBA with angle brackets.

But XML uniquely connects inter-application and inter-personal modes of communication. The bridge that it builds between these modes is the document. Now, for the first time, the packets exchanged among networked computers, and the documents written and read by people, are made of the same stuff. The document is part of a business conversation and also part of a human conversation. This talk explores the technologies that support this convergence, and the opportunities they create.