The Role of Standards in BPM

The Role of Standards in BPM Sandy Kemsley Kemsley Design Ltd. www.column2.com

Agenda
Risks and rewards
Process standards landscape
Graphical notation standards
Serialization standards
The future of standards

Risks and Rewards Why use a standard? Why not?

Value of Standards: Business
Commoditization of technology and services
Portability between modeling tools
Reduces ambiguity of process models

Value of Standards: Business-IT Alignment
Unbroken, bidirectional modeling-interchange-execution chain
Reduces translation errors between business and IT
Less time spent by business analysts teaching IT about business processes
IT time spent just cleaning up processes and hooking them up to the process engine

Value of Standards: Collaboration
Choreograph processes with partners
Share business models in community
Outsource business processes:
Process modeling and execution may be done by different organizations
Runtime statistics feed back for process visibility and optimization against original models

Standards Risks
Little value in being an early adopter of standards
Risks in choosing the wrong standard:
Obstructs technology upgrades
Limits business partner connectivity
Forces training in obsolete technology

How Standards Are Selected
Application/platform developers choose standards directly
Customers choose standards indirectly by selecting standards-compliant products

Process Standards Landscape Who’s doing what?

Source: BPM Standards Tutorial © 2007 Michael zur Muehlen. All Rights Reserved. Business Process Management Business Process Automation Business Process Innovation Business Process Monitoring Notation Standard Integration Standards Interaction Standards Standard Metrics Audit Standards

Process Standards
BPMN = Business Process Modeling Notation
Standard graphical notation
XPDL = XML Process Definition Language
De facto standard interchange format
BPDM = Business Process Definition Metamodel
Too soon to tell; may overtake XPDL as standard interchange format
BPEL = Business Process Execution Language
Execution language for some BPMS
Primarily used as integration/SOA interchange format

Related Standards
SVBR: Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules
ebXML BPSS (ebBP): Business Process Specification Schema
BPRI: Business Process Runtime Interface
UML: Unified Modeling Language
WS-CDL: Web Services Choreography Description Language

Process Standards Organizations
OMG - www.omg.org
Object Management Group
Standards for interoperable enterprise applications
Absorbed BPMI in 2005
WfMC - www.wfmc.org
Workflow Management Coalition
Workflow standards for terminology, interoperability and connectivity
OASIS - www.oasis-open.org
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
E-business standards

OMG
Model-driven architecture
Start with model of business
Auto-generate code from model
BPMN (through acquisition)
BPDM next

WfMC
Integration standards for process life cycle
Reference model + XPDL
Started in 1993

OASIS
Workgroup-specific BPM knowledge
ebXML, BPEL

W3C
Protocol stack standards for application integration
WS-CDL
No BPM experience

OMG & Process Standards Copyright Object Management Group 2006

WfMC & Process Standards XPDL 2.00 standard WFMC-TC-1025. Copyright Workflow Management Coalition 2006.

OASIS & Process Standards Published with permission of the author

The Problem with Process Standards
Several overlapping and competing standards
Multiple standards organizations
Different views of how standards fit together

Graphical Notation Standards Drawing a pretty – and standard – picture

Graphical notation standard: BPMN
Diagramming standard for drawing business processes
Method of communicating processes:
Understandable by business users and unambiguous
Reduces translation errors between business and IT
Easy transition between tools

From the BPMN Charter
Usable by the business community:
Minimum technical constraints on business user/analyst
Supports only the concepts of modeling that are applicable to business processes
Useful in illuminating a complex executable process
Produce unambiguous notation of a business process
Allow direct mapping from BPMN to BPEL

BPMN Issues
No serialization/file format
No user/role modeling
No data modeling
No KPI modeling
Methodology-independent

BPMN History
BPMN 0.9 draft by BPMI, 2002
BPMN 1.0 draft, 2003
BPMN 1.0, 2004
BPMI merged into OMG, 2005
BPMN 1.0 as OMG spec, 2006
BPMN 1.1, 2007

BPMN Flow Objects
Event
Activity
Gateway

BPMN Connecting Objects
Sequence flow
Message flow
Association

BPMN Swimlanes
Pool
Lanes

BPMN Artifacts
Data object
Group
Annotation

Exception Handling

Transaction

Events None n/a n/a Terminate Multiple Link n/a Rule n/a Compensation n/a Cancel n/a Error n/a Timer Message End Intermediate Start

Activities Expanded sub-process Collapsed sub-process Task (atomic)

Other Activity Markers Ad hoc sub-process Compensation Multiple instances Activity looping

Gateways Parallel (AND) Complex Inclusive (OR) Exclusive or (XOR), event-based Exclusive or (XOR), data-based

Sequence Flows Exception flow Default flow Conditional flow Uncontrolled flow Normal flow

Associations Compensation association

Multiple Collapsed Pools for B2B Modeling

Multiple Expanded Pools

Grouping Across Pools

BPMN Patterns – Data Objects Data objects as inputs and outputs Data object associated with sequence flow

Interchange Standards How processes get around

BPM interchange standards
Import/export of process models
Evolving landscape of standards:
XPDL (XML Process Definition Language)
BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel)

XPDL
Process definition serialization and interchange format
Maintains spatial information
Multiple processes per file
Allows vendor-specific extensions
Includes user interactions

XPDL
Interchange format for business process definitions
Defines how a process definition is serialized (written to a file)
Maintains graphical positional information
Multiple processes/subprocesses per file

XPDL
Includes user interactions
Does not include choreography
Allows vendor-specific extensions
Created by modeling tool or process engine
Ignored by other modeling tools and process engines
E.g., colored swimlanes

XPDL History
Developed by WfMC, www.wfmc.org
WPDL (Workflow Process Definition Language), 1998
XPDL 1.0, 2002
XPDL 2.0, 2005
Supported by 70+ modeling/BPM products

BPDM
Process definition serialization and interchange format
Includes choreography
Will become part of BPMN in future version
May displace XPDL

BPDM
Can serve as metamodel for BPMN
Metamodel can be used to generate an interchange format
May (attempt to) displace XPDL
Larger scope/more robust than XPDL
XPDL has 2-year head start
Includes choreography and orchestration

BPDM History
Developed by OMG, www.omg.org
RFP issued, 2003
BPDM 1.0, 2007

BPEL
Web services orchestration language
In BPM, may be used as interchange format
In SOA-related products, also used as execution language
Programming language for integration logic and process automation between services
Defines business processes as coordinated sets of Web service interactions
BPEL processes exposed as WSDL services
BPEL processes consume WSDL services

BPEL Issues
Does not include some BPMN functionality:
Human interaction
Interleaved process segments
Looping back to previous steps
Subprocessess
Does not include graphical layout info
Not fully interoperable between vendors

BPEL History
Developed by OASIS, www.oasis-open.org
BPEL4WS 1.0, 2002
BPEL4WS 1.1 proposed to OASIS, 2003
WS-BPEL 2.0 draft, 2005

The Future of Process Standards

BPMN and BPDM
BPMN will remain the primary graphical modeling notation
BPDM may eventually overtake XPDL as interchange/serialization standard
BPMN 2.0 will merge BPDM and BPMN 1.1

XPDL
XPDL as interchange/serialization standard for at least the short term

BPEL
BPEL may become more important as an interchange standard for SOA/integration than as an execution language
BPEL4People (human interactions) specification under development

Questions? Sandy Kemsley Kemsley Design Ltd. www.column2.com

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The Role of Standards in BPM

by Sandy Kemsley on Nov 13, 2007

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