Service economy already dominates and continues to grow in the GDP pie charts of the worlds major economies.Information services are the majority among services.Most of these services critically rely on IT and software support,which are often conveniently developed under the service-oriented architecture (SOA).With the Internet, availability of cheap small networking and storage devices, and the arrival of cloud computing, it is only logical to pursue BPaaS or "BusinessProcess-as-a-Service".This paper discusses a key obstacle in making BPaaS a reality—enterprise level data management that is fundamental in the software systems to support business processes.Extending the recent business artifact based modeling techniques for business processes, this paper outlines an approach called "self-guided artifacts" to cleanly divide data management and process (service) management.An independence principle of these two management components is also formulated.