The History of Process Orchestration

Tonkean

May 21, 2025

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min read

Process orchestration has emerged as a foundational component of the modern-day enterprise.

The functional importance of being able to effectively orchestrate your organization’s various component parts—from data stored in systems like Salesforce to the skillsets of your human employees to AI agents that can pull information from all your internal systems and present them to humans when and where they need it—is discussed daily by executives from Workday to IBM.

The importance is at least two-fold. Process orchestration is the key to leveraging your existing technology investments more seamlessly and harmoniously, such that the process experiences you provide employees are truly beneficial for them. It’s also the best way to make new innovative capabilities available to employees, such that you’re always empowering them efficiently. As Tonkean co-founder Sagi Eliyahu recently put it in Crunchbase, “The essential infrastructure for AI in the enterprise isn’t your LLM—it’s orchestration.”

But for as important as everyone generally recognizes process orchestration to be, it remains surprisingly misunderstood. We misunderstand its history, including its etymological and cultural roots. But that history turns out to illuminate much not only about what this sometimes-nebulous-seeming technology is and can do, but about where it’s headed, what exactly constitutes enterprise-grade orchestration—and why soon it will become even more crucial to our organizations than it is today.

We regularly update this in-depth primer, “What is Process Orchestration,” with new information and learnings as they come in.

But if you want to learn about the history of process orchestration technology in the enterprise… this is for you.

1. The etymological history of process orchestration

Let’s start with language. The term “process orchestration” blends two concepts:

Process:
- From Latin prōcessus ("forward movement"), via Old French proces.
- In business, the term has long meant a series of steps to achieve a specific goal.
Orchestration:
- Derived from Greek orchestra, later adopted into Latin and Old French as the place where ensembles coordinate performance.
- By the 18th century, orchestration meant specifically arranging music to be performed by an orchestra—organizing multiple instruments harmoniously.

Combined, process orchestration conveys the idea of coordinating multiple tasks, systems, and people harmoniously toward a common objective.

2. Early business origins (pre-software era)

Early 20th-century management theories emphasized standardized, coordinated processes to enhance productivity (think Taylorism, Fordism).
Then mid-century methods such as Business Process Management (BPM) emerged, initially documented clearly in manufacturing and logistics. “Orchestration” wasn't explicitly used yet; instead, coordination or management was the typical terminology.

3. Software & tech origins (~1980s–2000s)

Early workflow automation (1980s–90s) introduced software capable of managing sequential tasks.
The 90s–early 2000s then brought a rapid rise in complexity to the modern enterprise, as companies adopted many different specialized systems (CRM, ERP, HR software).
This greatly increased the need for means of simplifying enterprise processes and improving increasingly fragmented internal processes.
The term “orchestration” specifically entered software industry jargon during the rise of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when multiple software services needed to interact seamlessly.

By early 2000s, “process orchestration” became established, explicitly referencing software platforms that endeavor to automate and harmonize business processes across these multiple siloed applications and teams.

Still, the idea of using software to manage for operational complexity remained at heart something of a contradiction—wait, you want to reduce complexity by… adding more software to your tech stack?—for a very long time.

That began to change with the development of platforms like Tonkean that operate in what is sometimes called the “orchestration layer” of your technology stack. These are platforms that can wrap around your organization’s existing mix of tools, people, and policies.

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Such technology remains relatively rare, but it makes possible what we think of as “true” orchestration, which requires being able to orchestrate processes across all your organization’s various moving parts, including all your different technology environments and departments.

4. Modern Definition & Usage

Today, process orchestration broadly means:

Using technology to automatically coordinate business processes across multiple systems and people to ensure efficiency, consistency, and compliance.

Current Exemplar Use Cases:

1. Purchase Request Intake & Triage

Procurement teams often juggle thousands of purchase requests across disparate systems. Without orchestration, this leads to delays, rogue spend, and frustrated stakeholders.