The Business Process Management Interface (BPMI) group will
officially unveil its XML-based business process definition
language on 4 June, writes Danny Bradbury.
The event will take place at the fourth BPMI.org meeting, which
will piggyback on the Delphi Group Collaborative Commerce Summit in
San Diego
The announcement brings to a head 10 months of review work by the
industry group's member companies. The BPMI was founded last August
by business process software company Intalio.
If the industry has worked towards building and improving
technologies at the seven layers of the OSI stack over the past 20
years, then business processes could be considered to be the
eighth, as yet undefined, level.
Many companies have gone through considerable pain trying to define
and improve their business processes since the business process
re-engineering craze of the early 1990s. Clearly, defining and
documenting such processes still eludes many firms.
The Business Process Modelling Language (BPML) will serve as a
means for products to codify business processes into a set
language, according to BPMI spokesman Guy Madden.
BPML can be used for round-trip engineering business processes. "A
businessperson first models the process visually. Then based on
that diagram, the tool they are using produces the BPML. Then the
technical folks could perhaps alter the BPML," Madden
explained.
Another technology standard that the BPMI group has been working on
is the Business Process Query Language (BPQL). This language lets
users query the state of a business process that has been
documented in BPML. It answers questions such as how many processes
are running at any given time, and when they can be expected to
end. "It is a bit like SQL, except for business processes," says
Madden.
BPMI is not alone in the business process definition market. The
Workflow Management Coalition, for example, has the Workflow
Reference Model, and the Workflow Schema Description, defined using
Microsoft's Biztalk Framework.
Explaining the differences between the two organisations, Madden
said that, while the Workflow Management Coalition concentrates on
the integration of different workflow engines, the BPMI works at a
higher level, simply abstracting processes from software supporting
the BPML language.
BPMI member companies include BEA Systems, Web services software
supplier Bowstreet, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. Ominously, however,
Microsoft does not appear on the list, and it remains to be seen
how the company will support such behind-the-firewall process
integration in its own .net server suite.
www.bpmi.orghttp://www.wfmc.org/