With the realisation of the potential benefits of business process automation, many standards, best practices and technologies have evolved to model and execute business processes. The emerging web services technology provides great flexibility for the development of cross platform, service oriented applications. This paper addresses the utilisation of the web services technology for business process enactment and discusses a standardised architecture for web service based business process execution. As a key objective it highlights the need for standardisation in web service based business processes execution. In elaborating on the above need, this paper defines the development of a standard architecture to address key concerns such as service invocation, integration, transaction manage- ment, security and resource management in using the web services technology for business process execution.