I had a request from a reader for a list explaining the various acronyms that I use in these blog posts, and around BPM in general. I’m sure that there are several lists like this, but I’ve pulled together a starting list and have opened it up by creating it in a Google spreadsheet that anyone can edit.
Please go ahead and edit the Google spreadsheet to add your own here, or to make any corrections to the list. I reserve the right to edit or delete any inappropriate entries.
Robert Shapiro spoke on a webinar today about BPMN 2.0, including some of the history of how BPMN got to this point, changes and new features from the previous version and the challenges that those may create, the need for portability and conformance, and an update on XPDL 2.2. The webinar was hosted by the Workflow Management Coalition, where Shapiro chairs the conformance working group.
He started out with how WPDL started as an interchange format in the mid-90’s, then became XPDL 1.0 around 2001, around the time that the BPMN 1.0 standard was being kicked off. For those of you not up on your standards, XPDL is an interchange format (i.e., the file format) and BPMN prior to version 2.0 is a notation format (i.e., the visual representation); since BPMN didn’t include an interchange format, XPDL was updated to provide serialization of all BPMN elements.
With BPMN 2.0, serialization is being added to the BPMN standard, as well as many other new components including formalization of execution semantics and the definition of choreography model. In particular, there are significant changes to conformance, swimlanes and pools, data objects, subprocesses, and events; Shapiro walked through each of these in detail. I like some of the changes to events, such as the distinction between boundary and regular intermediate events, as well as the concept of interrupting and non-interrupting events. This makes for a more complex set of events, but much more representative.
Bruce Silver, who has been involved in the development of BPMN 2.0, wrote recently on what he thinks is missing from BPMN 2.0; definitely worth a read for some of what might be coming up in future versions (if Bruce has his way).
One key thing that is emerging, both as part of the standard and in practice, is portability conformance: one of the main reasons for these standards is to be able to move process models from one modeling tool to another without loss of information. This led to a discussion about BPEL, and how BPMN is not just for BPEL, or even just for executable processes. BPEL doesn’t fully support BPMN: there are things that you can model in BPMN that will be lost if you serialize to BPEL, since BPEL is intended as a web service orchestration language. For business analysts modeling processes – especially non-executable processes – a more complete serialization is critical.
In case you’re wondering about BPDM, which was originally intended to be the serialization format for BPMN, it appears to have become too much of an academic exercise and not enough about solving the practical serialization problem at hand. Even as serialization is built into BPMN 2.0 and beyond, XPDL will likely remain a key interchange format because of the existing base of XPDL support by a number of BPM and BPA vendors. Nonetheless, XPDL will need to work at remaining relevant to the BPM market in the world of BPEL and BPMN, although it is likely to remain as a supported standard for years to come even if the BPMN 2.0 serialization standard is picked up by a majority of the vendors.
The webinar has about 60 attendees on it, including the imaginatively named “asdf” (check the left side of your keyboard) and several acquaintances from the BPM standards and vendor communities. The registration page for the webinar is here, and I imagine that that will eventually link to the replay of the webinar. The slides will also be available on the WfMC site.
If you want to read more about BPMN 2.0, don’t go searching on the OMG site: for some reason, they don’t want to share draft versions of the specification except to paid OMG members. Here’s a direct link to the 0.9 draft version from November 2008, but I also recommend tracking Bruce Silver’s blog for insightful commentary on BPMN.
Tagged BPDM, BPEL, BPMN, XPDLDerek Miers gave a short session that was supposed to be about the business benefits of BPM standards, but ended up as a bit of a BPM standards bun fight. As I mentioned in my first post this morning, I think that Think Tank needs more about standards, I’m just not sure that a few minutes of unstructured debate — mostly from vendors who are involved in the standards process — really satisfies the need.
According to the authors’ description, you’ll learn the following from this book:
I’ll let you know if I learned all of that once I’ve had a chance to read it.
Jan Mendling of Queensland University of Technology presented a paper on Instantiation Semantics for Process Models, co-authored with Gero Decker of HPI Potsdam. Their main focus was on determining the soundness of process models, particularly based on the entry points to processes.
They considered six different process notations and syntax: open workflow nets, YAWL, event-driven process chains, BPEL (the code, not a graphical representation), UML activity diagrams, and BPMN. They determined how an entry point is represented in each of these notations, with three different types of entry points: a start place (such as in open workflow nets), a start event (such as in BPMN), and a start condition (such as in event-driven process chains). He walked through a generic process execution environment, showing the entry points to process execution.
They created a framework called CASU: Creation (what triggers a new process instance), Activation (which of the multiple entry points are activated on creation), Subscription (which other start events are waited for upon the triggering of one start event), and Unsubscription (how long are the other start events waited for). Each of these four activities has several possible patterns, e.g., Creation can be based on a single condition, multiple events, or other patterns of events.
The CASU framework allows for the classification of the instantiation semantics of different modeling languages; he showed a classification table that evaluated each of the six process notations against the 5 Creation patterns, 5 Activation patterns, 3 Subscription patterns and 5 Unsubscription patterns, showing how well each notation supports each pattern. One important note is that BPEL and BPMN do not support the same patterns, meaning that there is not a 100% mapping between BPMN and BPEL: we all knew that, but it’s nice to see more research backing it up. 
Having multiple start events in a process causes all sorts of problems in terms of understandability and soundness, and he doesn’t recommend this in general; however, since the notations support it and therefore it can be done in practice, analysis of multi-start point instantiation semantics is important to understand how the different modeling languages handle these situations.
After a few brief introductions from the various conference organizers (in which we learned that next year’s conference is in Ulm, Germany), we had a keynote from Paul Harmon on the current state and future of BPM. It covered a lot of the past, too: from the origins of quality management and process improvement through every technique used in the past 100 years to the current methods and best practices. A reasonable summary of how we got to where we are.
His “future promise”, however, isn’t all that future: he talks about orchestrating ERP processes with a BPMS, something that’s already a well-understood functionality, if not widely implemented. He points out (and I agree) that many uses of BPMS today are not that innovative: they’re being used the same way as the workflow and EAI systems of 5 years ago, namely, as better programming tools to automate a process. He sees the value of today’s BPMS as helping managers to manage processes, both in terms of visibility and agility; of course, it’s hard to do that unless you have the first part in place, it’s just that a lot of companies spend too much effort on the first level of just automating the processes, and never get to the management part of BPM.
He discussed the importance of BPMN in moving BPMS into the hands of managers and business analysts, in that a basic — but still standards-compliant — BPMN diagram can be created without adornment by someone on the business side without having to consider many of the exception flows or technical implementation details: this “happy path” process will execute as it is, but won’t handle all situations. The exceptions and technical details can be added at a second modeling/design phase while still maintaining the core process as originally designed by the business person.
He also showed a different view of a business process: instead of modeling the internal processes, model the customer processes — what the customer goes through in order to achieve their goals — and align that with what goes on internally and what could be done to improve the customer experience. Since the focus is on the customer process and not the internal process, the need for change to internal process can become more evident: a variation on walking a mile in their shoes.
His definition of BPM is very broad, encompassing not just the core processes, but performance management, people, technology, facilities, management and suppliers/partners: an integration of quality, management and IT. Because of the broad involvement of people across an organization, it’s key to find a common language about process that spans IT and business management.
Although they’re not there yet, you can find a copy of his slides later this week by searching for BPM2008HarmonKeynote at BPtrends.com.
Tagged BPMN, paul harmon
This book is for both business users and process modeling practitioners alike. Part I provides an easily understood introduction to the key components of BPMN (put forward in a user-friendly fashion). Starting off with simple models, it progresses into more sophisticated patterns. Exercises help cement comprehension and understanding (with answers available online). Part II provides a detailed and authoritative reference on the precise semantics and capabilities of the standard.
I wrote earlier this week about the just-released BPMN book by Tom Debevoise and Rick Geneva; this is obviously the year that BPMN goes mainstream, or at least makes the attempt. White and Miers’ book, although a bit longer than Debevoise and Geneva’s, is also more than twice the price, and also doesn’t seem to offer an e-book option: hard to become a staple of every process-oriented person in an organization at a $40 price point.
I’ll be very interested to read Bruce Silver’s review of these books. Unless, of course, he’s writing his own.
From the product description on Amazon:
With over fifty implementations listed, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly successful Object Management Group (OMG) standard. Whether you are in government, manufacturing or retailing you can accurately depict your processes in BPMN! Yet, OMG BPMN specification 1.1 is abstract, lengthy and complicated. So, learning to use BPMN can be daunting. So you will need the strait forward [sic] information in this book. This guide gathers all the ideas, design, and problem solving of BPMN into one simple, focused book, and offers concrete true-life examples that explain BPMN’s approach to process modeling.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet so can’t compare it to the many other sources of BPMN instruction out there, such as the recently-released BPMN, the Business Process Modeling Notation Pocket Handbook
Previously, I posted about the free BPMN 1.0 poster available for download from ITPoster.net, and now the Business Process Technology Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute has published one for BPMN 1.1. Both provide a good quick reference; the BPT version has just the graphical object notation, while the ITPoster version also includes some patterns and antipatterns.
Also, check out BPT’s BPMN Corner, which has a number of good BPMN links, including Oryx, a web-based BPMN editor, and BPMN stencils for Visio and OmniGraffle.
Tagged BPMNNot only did Oracle schedule this briefing on Canada Day, the biggest holiday in Canada, but they forced me to download the Real Player plug-in in order to participate. The good part, however, is that it was full streaming audio and video alongside the slides.
Charles Phillips, Oracle President, kicked off with a welcome and some background on Oracle, including their focus on database, middleware and applications, and how middleware is the fastest-growing of these three product pillars. He described how Oracle Fusion middleware is used both by their own applications as well as ISVs and customers implementing their own SOA initiatives.
He outlined their rationale for acquiring BEA: complementary products and architecture, internal expertise, strategic markets such as Asia, and the partner and channel ecosystem. He stated that they will continue to support BEA products under the existing support lifetimes, with no forced migration policies to move off of BEA platforms. They now consider themselves #1 in the middleware market in terms of both size and technology leadership, and Phillips gave a gentle slam to IBM for over-inflating their middleware market size by including everything but the kitchen sink in what they consider to be middleware.
The BEA developer and architect online communities will be merged into the Oracle Technology Network: Dev2Dev will be merged into the Oracle Java Developer community, and Arch2Arch will be broadened to the Oracle community.
Retaining all the BEA development centers, they now have 4,500 middleware developers; most BEA sales, consulting and support staff were also retained and integrated into the the Fusion middleware teams.
Next up was Thomas Kurian, SVP of Product Development for Fusion Middleware and BEA product directions, with a more detailed view of the Oracle middleware products and strategy. Their basic philosophy for middleware is that it’s a unified suite rather than a collection of disjoint products, it’s modular from a purchasing and deployment standpoint, and it’s standards-based and open. He started to talk about applications enabled by their products, unifying SOA, process management, business intelligence, content management and Enterprise 2.0.
They’ve categorized middleware products into 3 categories on their product roadmap (which I have reproduced here directly from Kurian’s slide:
For the “continue and converge” category, that is, of course, a bit different than “no forced migration”, but this is to be expected. My issue is with the overlap between the “strategic” category, which can include a convergence of an Oracle and a BEA product, and the “continue and converge” category, which includes products that will be converged into another product: when is a converged product considered “strategic” rather than “continue and converge”, or is this just the spin they’re putting on things so as to not freak out BEA customers who have put huge investments into a BEA product that is going to be converged into an existing Oracle product?
He went on to discuss how each individual Oracle and BEA product would be handled under this categorization. I’ve skipped the parts on development tools, transaction processing, identity management, systems management and service delivery, and gone right to their plans for the Service-Oriented Architecture products:
Note that the Oracle Service Bus is in the “strategic” category, but is a convergence of AL-SB and Oracle ESB, which means that customers of one of those two products (or maybe both) are not going to be happy.
Kurian stated that Oracle sees four types of business processes — system-centric, human-centric, document-centric and decision-centric (which match the Forrester divisions) — but believes that a single product/engine that can handle all of these is the way to go, since few processes fall purely into one of these four categories. They support BPEL for service orchestration and BPMN for modeling, and their plan is to converge a single platform that supports both BPEL and BPMN (I assume that he means both service orchestration and human-facing workflow). Given that, here’s their strategy for Business Process Management products:
Similar to the ESB categorization, I find the classification of the converged Oracle BPM product (BEA AL-BPM and Oracle BPEL PM) as “strategic” to be at odds with his original definition: it should be in the “continue & converge” category since the products are being converged. This convergence is not, however, unexpected: having two separate BPM platforms would just be asking for trouble. In fact, I would say that having two process modelers is also a recipe for trouble: they should look at how to converge the Oracle BPA Designer and the BEA AL-BPM Designer
In the portals and Enterprise 2.0 product area, Kurian was a bit more up-front about how WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic UI are going to be merged into the corresponding Oracle products:
In SOA governance:
Kurian discussed the implications of this product strategy on Oracle Applications customers: much of this will be transparent to Oracle Applications, since many of these products form the framework on which the applications are built, but are isolated so that customizations don’t touch them. For those changes that will impact the applications, they’ll be introduced gradually. Of course, some Oracle Apps are already certified with BEA products that are now designated as strategic Oracle products.
Oracle has also simplified their middleware pricing and packaging, with products structured into 12 suites:
He summed up with their key messages:
The entire briefing will be available soon for replay on Oracle’s website if you’re interested in seeing the full hour and 45 minutes. There’s more information about the middleware products here, and you can sign up to attend an Oracle BEA welcome event in your city.
Tagged BPEL, BPMNThe second part of the morning keynote was by Bill Curtis, who was involved in developing CMM and CMMI, and now is working on the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). I’ve seen quite a bit about BPMM at OMG functions, but this is the first time that I’ve heard Curtis speak about it.
He started by talking about the process/function matrix, where functions focus on the performance of skills within an area of expertise, and processes focus on the flow and transformation of information or material. In other words, functions are the silos/departments in organizations (e.g., marketing, engineering, sales, admin, supply chain, finance, customer service), and processes are the flows that cut across them (e.g., concept to retire, campaign to order, order to cash, procure to pay, incident to close. Unfortunately, as we all know, the biggest problems occur with the white space in between the silos when the processes aren’t structured properly, and a small error at the beginning of the process causes increasingly large amounts of rework in other departments later in the process: items left off the bill of sale by sales created missing information in legal, incomplete specs in delivery, and incorrect invoices in finance. Typical for many industries is 30% rework — an alarming figure that would never be tolerated in manufacturing, for example, where rework is measured and visible.
Curtis’ point is that low maturity organizations have a staggering about of rework, causing incredibly inefficient processes, and they don’t even know about it because they’re not measuring it. As with many things, introspection breeds change. And just as Ted Lewis was talking about EA as not just being IT architecture, but a business-IT decision-making framework, Curtis talked about how the concepts of CMM in IT were expanded into BPMM, a measurement of both business and IT maturity relative to business processes.
In case you haven’t seen the BPMM, here’s the five levels:
The top two levels are really identical to innovative management practices, but the advantage of BPMM is that it provides a path to get from where we are now to these innovative practices. Curtis also sees this as a migration from a chaotic clash of cultures to a cohesive culture of innovation.
This was a fabulous, fast-paced presentation that left me with a much deeper understanding of — and appreciation for — BPMM. He had some great slides with this, which will apparently be available on the Transformation & Innovation website later this week.
Now the hard part starts: trying to pick between a number of interesting-sounding breakout sessions.
Tagged BPMMActive Endpoints is hosting a webinar this Thursday on BPEL Basics for Java Developers, featuring Ron Romano, their principal consulting architect. From their information:
A high-level overview of BPEL and its importance in a web-services environment is presented, along with a brief discussion of the basic BPEL activities and how they relate to Java concepts. The following topics will be covered:
- Parsing the Language of SOA with Java as a guide
- Breaking out of the VM: evolving from RPC to Web Services
- BPEL Activities – Receive, Reply, Invoke
- BPEL Facilities – Fault Handling and Compensation (“Undo”)
The VP of Marketing assures me that he was allowed only two slides at the end of the presentation, and that otherwise this is focused on the technical goodies.
You need to register in advance at the link above.
Tagged BPELI really didn’t sit down this afternoon to write that last enormous post on the Great BPMN Debate, I remembered that Jan Recker (co-author on the research paper that sparked the debate, although not a participant in the debate) had sent me a pre-release copy of a paper that he authored, “BPMN Modeling — Who, Where, How and Why”, which summarizes the results of the survey that he conducted last year. One thought led to another, and before you know it, I’d written an essay on the most exciting thing to happen in BPM standards in ages.
Back to Jan’s paper however, which will be published this month on BPTrends. He surveyed 590 process modelers using BPMN from over 30 countries, and found some interesting results:
He finished with a list of the major obstacles that the respondents reported in using BPMN, or places that they would like to see improvement:
I’ll publish a link to the paper when it appears on BPTrends; it’s fairly short and worth the read.
Tagged BPMNIf you have even a passing interest in BPMN, you’re probably aware of the great debate happening amongst a few of the BPM bloggers in the past week:
Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker publish an academic research paper on BPMN usage, “How Much Language is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation“, to be presented at an upcoming conference. To quote the introduction in the paper, its aim is “to examine, using statistical techniques, which elements of BPMN are used in practice”, and they laid out their methods for gathering the underlying data. They used some standard cluster analysis techniques to identify clusters of BPMN objects based on usage, and determined that the practical complexity (what’s really used) was significantly different from the theoretical complexity (the total set) of BPMN. Michael teaches in the BPM program at Stevens Institute of Technology, so I wasn’t surprised to see a stated objective related to BPMN training: “BPMN training programs could benefit from a structure that introduces students to the most commonly used subset first before moving on to advanced modeling concepts.” Note that he says “before moving on to”, not “while completely disregarding”.
Michael then blogged about the paper but went further by listing three implications that were not expressed in the paper:
It was these implications that sparked the arguments that followed, starting with Bruce Silver’s post directly challenging much of what Michael said in his post. It appeared to me that Bruce hadn’t read the full research paper, but was commenting only on Michael’s blog post, hence didn’t fully appreciate that the paper was really just analyzing what people are doing now, not making any value judgements about it. Bruce was a bit harsh, especially where he suggests that Michael’s “BPMN Overhead” label on the least-used objects was “clearly meant to mean ‘useless appendages’.” Bruce had some valid rebuttals to Michael’s three implications, and although I disagree somewhat with Bruce’s first two points (as I commented on his post, and was rewarding by Bruce telling me that I was stating the bloody obvious), I agree that the standard makers have not included unnecessary complexity, but that they have created a standard that the market still needs to grow into. However, I find the BPMN specification to be overly verbose, creating a greater degree of perceived complexity than may actually exist.
Michael responded to Bruce’s post by pointing out that the aim of their research was to find out how people actually use BPMN, not how vendors, consultants and standards bodies think that they use it (or think that they should use it). Michael restates his three implications in greater detail, the first two of which seem to align with what I thought that he said (and stated in my comment on Bruce’s original post). His clarification on his third point was interesting:
We actually like BPMN’s advanced vocabulary. But have you asked end users what they think? Well, we did. Not only in this study but also in Jan’s large-scale BPMN usability studies we did find that users are in fact very troubled by the sheer number of, for example, event constructs. Are they used at a large scale? No. Do users understand their full capacity? Typically not. Why is this not at all reflected in BPMN development? That is exactly our point. Sure, our argument is a somewhat provocative statement. But if it helps to channel some attention to end usage, that’s fair by our standards.
Bruce responds in turn, saying that if Michael had presented this as “statistical correlations between diagram elements in a sample of BPMN collected in the wild”, then it would have been okay, but that the conclusions drawn from the data are flawed. In other words, he’s saying that the research paper is valid and interesting, but the post that Michael wrote promoting the paper (and including those unintentionally provocative implications) is problematic. As it turns out, in terms of Michael’s group of the 17 least-used BPMN constructs, Bruce could live without 15 of them, but will fight to the end for the other two: exception flow and intermediate error event. However, Michael doesn’t say that these are useless — that’s Bruce’s paraphrasing — just that they’re not used.
There’s a bit of chicken-and-egg going on here, since I believe that business analysts aren’t using these constructs because they don’t know that they exist, not because they’re useless. Many analysts don’t receive any sort of formal training in BPMN, but are given a BPMN-compliant tool and just use the things that they know from their swimlane flowcharting experience.
Anyway, Bruce finishes up by misinterpreting (I believe) the conclusion of Michael’s post:
Michael ends his piece by asserting that the real BPMN is not what vendors, consultants, and trainers like me say it is, but the way untrained practitioners are using it today.
What Michael actually said was:
[O]ur own experiences with BPMN and with those organizations using it gave us this hunch that the theoretical usage (what vendors and consultants and trainers tell us) often has little to do with what the end users think or do (the practical usage). And why is it important to know what the end users think and do? Because it can help the researchers, vendors, consultants and trainers of this world to channel their attention and efforts to those problems real users face. Instead of the problems we think exist in practice.
Although it’s not completely clear, I believe that Michael is saying that we need to understand what people are doing with BPMN now in order to design both training and systems.
This was an interesting debate to watch, since I know and respect both Michael and Bruce, and I found merit in the arguments on both sides although I don’t fully agree with either.
There was an interesting coda on the validity of BPMN for model-driven development with Tom Baeyens weighing in on the debate and stating that BPMN should stick to being a modeling notation and not be concerned with the underlying execution details: “[t]he properties can be removed and the mapping approach to concrete executable process languages should be left up to the vendors.” Bruce responded with some thoughts on model portability, and how that drives his categorization of BPMN constructs.
If you’re at all interested in BPMN, it’s worth taking the time to work your way through this debate, and keep and eye on Bruce and Michael’s blogs for any further commentary.
Tagged BPMNThere’s something funny about chatting via IM with someone as you’re listening to them give a public webinar, even when you do know that the presentation is pre-recorded — I was on Skype with Bruce Silver today during his webinar The Business Process Expert and the Future of BPM on ebizQ, where he was speaking with Marco ten Vaanholt of SAP’s BPX community.
Except for one “happy smiling faces” graphic worthy only of Jim Sinur’s blog pimping marketing team, I really enjoyed Bruce’s presentation, although I’ve heard at least parts of it before. He started with a comprehensive description of BPM and why model-driven design is so critical to process agility, which he segued into a description of BPMN and its importance in making process models executable: the heart of model-driven design. He feels that it’s necessary to define the role of Business Process Expert (BPX): someone that bridges between business and IT, creating executable requirements for BPM solutions. Obviously, BPMN is a critical skill for the BPX, and Bruce offers a number of resources including a free series of articles and e-learning modules that he’s done on the SAP BPX community and the longer paid courses that he offers online and public classes through BPM Institute. No wonder he hasn’t blogged for months: he’s been too busy creating all this.
Marco ten Vaanholt talked about the importance of BPM and SOA — fairly motherhood sort of stuff — then dug into some details of the SAP BPX community, which is an incredibly well-developed resource for anyone involved in BPM, whether you’re an SAP customer or not. The core of the BPX community is collaboration and collective learning on business scenarios, process lifecycles, change leadership, social responsibility, horizontal and vertical practices, modeling tools, methodologies and a variety of other topics. It’s not just a discussion forum, however: there’s a lot of really valuable content, such as Bruce’s articles and e-learning, from both SAP and the community in general.
Marilyn Pratt, the BPX community evangelist, has been keeping me up to date on what’s happening on BPX and the worldwide community events in which she’s been involved, and I’m looking forward to catching up with her and seeing more of BPX in action when I attend SAPPHIRE in May.
There was some good Q&A at the end about process modeling and the BPX community. Definitely worth watching the replay, which should be available online at the original webinar link above.
Tagged BPMNI’m up now, and here’s what I’ll be presenting:
I know, it’s long, but I’ll breeze past a number of the slides that I put in there just for reference. If this isn’t enough on standards for you, I highly recommend Michael zur Muehlen’s BPM standards tutorial, both the slides and the audio. I liked it so much, I stole a couple of his slides, although he’ll probably sit in on my session to keep me honest.
Alec Sharp led a facilitated session on standards that we love, hate, or wish were there (or don’t care about). This is a bit similar to the BPM Think Tank roundtables, but we’re at about six small tables so had a chance for some mini-break-out sessions to discuss ideas, then gather them together.
The notes that came out of this:
I don’t necessarily agree with all of these points, since this turned into mostly a standards-bashing session, but it was an interesting debate.
Tagged BPMNMichael zur Muehlen sent me a link to the updated version of his standards tutorial, and to the audio recording provided by the BPM conference organizers in Brisbane. Enjoy!
Michael zur Muehlen, who I met at the BPM Think Tank in August, gave a tutorial on standards at the recent BPM conference in Brisbane, Australia. He noticed that I’m giving a presentation on standards at the upcoming Shared Insights/IIR BPM conference in San Diego next month, and invited me to check out his slides on Slideshare:
Considering that I have to submit my slides this week, these could really come in handy to help fine-tune my thoughts.
I received an email last week from Nathaniel Palmer of WfMC on the upcoming XPDL 2.1 specification:
We are now in the process of developing the specification for XPDL 2.1 with the final list of changes to be completed by the next WfMC meeting on October 11-12, 2007.
It is expected that XPDL 2.1 will incorporate changes coming out of XPDL 2.0 as well as those required for BPMN 1.1 compatibility. In addition, however, we are soliciting further input, particularly from those with experience working with XPDL 2.0 or earlier.
Interested parties are asked to please respond directly to XPDL Working Group Chair Robert Shapiro with one or both of the following:
1) Proposed Changes for XPDL 2.1 Specification - please be as specific as possible providing details about what to change in the existing specification;
2) Volunteer to Help Re-Write the Spec and Update the Schema - please
be willing commit two or more days over the next three months to assist in this endeavor.Please contact Robert Shapiro directly via email at robert.shapiro@global360.com
The time for the release of XPDL 2.1 is as follow:
- October 12 – Finalize List of Proposed Changes
- November 15 – Finalize Details for Identified Changes in BPMN 1.1
- December 15 – Draft Specification for Internal Review
- January 15 – Updated Specification For Public Review
- February 20 – Vote on Adoption of Final XPDL 2.1 Specification
XPDL will continue to be an important standard for the serialization of business processes (i.e., the file format that you use to save it, once you’ve modelled it in BPMN) for some years to come, and it still remains to be seen what impact that the new BPDM format will have on the use of XPDL.
Tagged XPDL
