Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Computer Sciences Corporation has anounced its adoption of Business Process Modelling Language (BPML) 1.0 as a foundation of its e3 enterprise architecture. CSC identified nine major business drivers forcing the types of changes BPM is designed to address. They include consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, divestitures, regulatory compliance, business model shifts, changing customer expectations, industry standardization and business process outsourcing.

CSC adopts BPML as foundation for E3(SM) enterprise architecture [source CSC]

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Forrester says "Almost two years after inception, BPMI.org -- now backed by more than 130 members -- has released the first public draft of its Business Process Modeling Language. Our take? Firms should bet on BPML for describing end-to-end business processes."

BPML 1.0: A Step Toward Process Interoperability [source Forrester]
BPM is a hot topic these days – and the financial figures behind BPM show why. This article looks at the business case and ROI of BPM. Barry Murphy, a market analyst with Delphi Group expects "a market explosion" for Business Process Management (BPM) solutions. He notes that over 70% of companies are deploying or evaluating BPM solutions within the next year. "Today we are just scratching the surface", he said. What will become of BPM? Does it have the staying power to endure within the enterprise? Can it provide sufficient value to cross the chasm and achieve mainstream market adoption, or will it gradually disappear into the sunset and be added to the list of higly touted technologies that never met expectations?

The Economic Benefits of BPM [source EAIJournal]
Almost every enterprise has made substantial investments in business applications and databases. Millions of lines of code have been written. One could even argue that almost every important business function is already coded and in production. In an ideal world, all these business functions would be individually packaged and fully interchangeable; building new applications would simply be a matter of putting the functions you need in the proper order. This notion has great appeal. The term "composite application" is gaining momentum in the industry as a way to describe such a program. Put simply, a composite application requires very little new code; instead, it relies on other systems to do most of its work. In effect, it is a composite of many applications, and the majority of its business logic is stored and executed on other enterprise systems.

Integrating Legacy Environments: How Reusable Business Components Accelerate the Process [source ebizq.net and WRQ]
Understanding your organization's processes and process management is critical to running it, especially when it is directly related to the key performance indicators of the business. The penalties of not managing knowledge and business processes correctly can be as minor as losing market share or as major as losing an entire company. That's a lesson the U.K.'s Barings Bank learned in 1995 when a lack of procedural checks on rogue trader Nick Leeson led to the former Barings investment officer losing $1.2 billion of his employer's money in unauthorized trades--and bringing down the entire bank.

Managing Knowledge: The Rise of Enterprise Process Management and Content Management Tools [Source ebizq.net and NimbusPartners]

Sunday, July 14, 2002

The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is the next frontier destined to give companies competitive advantage in managaing their value chain relationships. Large companies currently spend more than 30 percent of their IT budgets integrating their business applications under the banner of enterprise application integration (EAI), trying to get their internal act together for yet another step, business-to-business integration (B2Bi). Why are they going to all this effort and expense? They are tying together fragments of their stovepipe applications to create end-to-end, multi-company business processes—those activities that bring ultimate value to customers. It is indeed the entire value chain, not a single company, that delivers the goods or services. Value chain management is now clearly recognized as the next frontier for gaining new productivity and competitive advantage. If end-to-end business processes are the focus of internal and cross-company integration, why not deal directly with the "business process" instead of "applications?"

Integrated Value Chain [source Internet World]

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

For years the industry has dreamed of modeling business processes in software and combining them like Tinker Toys. Web services orchestration, the new term for that old idea, becomes more interesting as raw services multiply behind firewalls. But as integration vendors point out, the orchestration layers of the Web services stack aren't yet baked. The standards pioneers -- Microsoft, IBM, and now Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems -- are busy in the kitchen.

Two proposed XML grammars for describing the orchestration of Web services -- Microsoft's XLANG, used by BizTalk, and IBM's WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) -- were widely expected to have merged by now into a joint World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) submission. That hasn't happened. Meanwhile, Sun, BEA, SAP, and Intalio have introduced a third candidate: WSCI (Web Service Choreography Interface). The relationships among these three proposals -- and others, including Intalio's BPML (Business Process Markup Language) and ebXML's BPSS (Business Process Schema Specification) -- are murky.

Orchestrate services [Source Infoworld]

Thursday, July 04, 2002

The WSCI consortium publishes key web services orchestration standard based on BPML. "Interoperability of Web services needs to extend beyond basic messaging, and WSCI enables Web services to interact with each other in specified ways to accomplish the needs of complex business processes," said Richard Green, vice president and general manager, Java & XML Technologies, Sun Microsystems. "This is a major step forward for the industry and will provide a key piece of technology to support Sun's Java Web Services software initiatives."

"Web services need to be flexibly combined to drive collaboration," said Karl-Heinz Hess, member of the Extended Management Board of SAP AG. "SAP contributes its long-standing business expertise to WSCI ensuring that comprehensive automated business processes can be adequately described."

"BEA believes that a workflow interface language is a key next step in the evolution of the Web Services architecture," said David Orchard, W3C Lead and W3C Architecture Group member, BEA Systems. "This work is clear indication of BEA's support for community and other efforts in Web Service technology development."

"Intalio is delighted to co-author the WSCI specification with a distinguished group of leading software companies that share the vision of bridging the gap between business process management and Web services. With its strategic participation in WSCI, Intalio builds on its commitment to open standards," said Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio co-founder and chief strategy officer. "Our collective efforts on the WSCI specification will enable customers to more easily and cost-effectively deploy end-to-end processes across value networks. Intalio will leverage the WSCI specification in its strategic product offerings to help customers reduce process design-to-production cost, control total cost of process ownership, and deliver strategic return on process investment."

BEA, Intalio, SAP, Sun publish Web Services Choreography Interface, take web services collaboration to new level

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

Imagine a world where people speak a language that brilliantly describes the molecular structure of a large object but can't tell you what the object is - or that it's about to fall on you. You've just glimpsed the arcane world of business process applications. Fortunately, an emerging Business Process Management Language (BPML) standard championed by Sterling Commerce is beginning to change all that. "BPML is prosaic enough to describe the process of hosting a dinner party yet sophisticated enough to handle describing how computer system 'A' talks to computer system 'B,'" said Jeanne Baker, director, e-business integration solutions for Sterling Commerce and board member of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), developer of BPML.

BPML: Launching A New Era In Business Process Management [source SterlingCommerce]
This analyst claims "Workflow technologies are everywhere, having been embedded in a range of development tools, network applications and Web services. Workflow standards are everywhere, too, but they never seem to jump the gap from hopeful press releases to broad adoption. So it's with considerable skepticism that we should greet the recent announcement that the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and the Business Process Management Institute (BPMI) have agreed to converge their efforts to define XML-based workflow-process definition standards. Potentially, the alliance could bring WfMC's XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) and BPMI's Business Process Markup Language (BPML) under a common standards initiative."

Still no universal workflow [source NetworkWorld]