A method and system for specifying, deploying and updating work flows. A request is received from a user of a system with components comprising a computing system and human representatives. The components facilitate routing and servicing the request. A work flow comprising manual and automatic steps is specified to perform the routing and servicing of the request. The automatic steps are automatically performed by the computing system and the manual steps are manually performed by the representatives. Both the automatic steps and the manual steps are uniformly defined in a single general-purpose markup language (e.g., XML). Further, a manual step is dynamically transformed into a new automatic step that is represented as a new XML action element. The new XML action element includes an identifier of a software routine to be executed to perform the new automatic step.