Monday, November 25, 2002

Standards bodies and software vendors are putting the final touches on a number of Web-services specifications that could revolutionize the way companies collaborate. The standards are related to XML, a language used by businesses to model enterprise data that's become an instrumental part of Web services. While the technology that underlies each of the new specs marks up data similarly to XML, its capabilities go far beyond that of XML's. "This is something weird and different," says Howard Smith, chief technology officer at Computer Sciences Corp. Europe. "It's not Web services, it's not the reinvention of workflow, it's not process-management workflow, it's new. It unifies those things. It's like taking the best of every other paradigm and building a nice new model." BPML, the Business Process Markup Language, is published by the Business Process Management Initiative, a group backed by dozens of major IT vendors, including BEA Systems, CSC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. It released the first draft of the language in August. Compared with XML, BPML lets users model a company's business processes from top to bottom.

A New Way Of Collaborating [source InformationWeek]

Saturday, November 16, 2002

The new book provides the first authoritative analysis of how Business Process Management (BPM) reinvents traditional business reengineering and links business strategy directly to process execution. Written by Computer Sciences Corporation's Howard Smith and acclaimed co-author Peter Fingar the book heralds a breakthrough in process thinking that obliterates the business-IT divide, utterly transforms today's information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution.

"Despite the surrounding confusion and hype, BPM is now recognized as the pragmatic path to agility as companies adapt to the current business landscape," said Ismael Ghalimi, BPMI.org's Chair and Intalio's Chief Strategy Officer. "This book provides the accurate and in-depth information that business leaders require to successfully implement BPM projects today."

BPMI.org endorses landmark book: Business Process Management: The Third Wave [source BPMI.org]
A new XML standard for automating business process management was released as a final draft Wednesday, setting the stage for the addition of standards-based workflow capabilities to enterprise servers and applications.

Business Process Standard Moves Forward [source InternetWeek]
The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) Tuesday took a step forward in its quest to create a new standard for describing business processes within Web services, with the release of the final draft of the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML 1.0) specification and. BPMI.org also released the first public draft of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN 0.9) specification.

Standards Group Airs Business Process Spec [source InternetNews.com]

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Web services and business process management (BPM), two promising if arcane approaches to software design, may prove to be a potent combination. If analysts' predictions come to pass, the perennial question that haunts most companies' software strategies — whether to build or buy — may give way to a build-and-buy approach, with Web services and BPM able to tie it all together. The result, say analysts, is that software now in use — whether packaged applications or homegrown systems — once integrated and recombined with help from Web services and BPM, could provide unprecedented flexibility while protecting current investments. And while the vision of broad "end-to-end" integration is still a ways off, companies are taking early steps.

Web Services: A Work in Process [source CFO.com]