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]

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]

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]

IBM is gearing up to take WebSphere V5 live, as the company offered a sneak peek this week of some of the upgrades over previous versions. Chief among these, according to IBM Director of Marketing for WebSphere Scott Hebner, is the addition of an integrated workflow engine geared to tie Web services together. The Armonk, N.Y. firm claims it is the first full Web services workflow tool for the Java Enterprise Edition. Gartner analyst Jess Thompson told internetnews.com the news is an indication of how IBM is assimilating the assets of such workflow integration and business process management purchases as CrossWorlds, MetaMerge and Holosofx. This, Thompson said, is important because those firms contain certain assets that overlap with features of IBM's Websphere MQSeries integration software. Thompson said he estimates the streamling of those assets may take three to four years.

Big Blue Busting to Break Out WebSphere V5 [source Internetnews]

Microsoft's web-services strategy, until now focused on the tactical issue of IT plumbing, is shifting to the more strategic, and tougher, set of problems involving business processes. Products in development, described for the first time last week, aim not only to connect employees and companywide operations but also to improve collaboration and maybe even reinvent processes. It's a big step for a company with a 25-year reputation as a platform provider. The new spin became clearer last week, as Microsoft executives appeared at events on both coasts to describe how new XML-based products will address collaboration, business-process management, and real-time visibility of data.

Microsoft's new blueprint aims more squarely at business processes and collaboration [source InformationWeek]

Lombardi Software has announced version 3.3 of TeamWorks, the company's business process management (BPM) platform that connects people, processes and systems. "Our customers are deploying TeamWorks to tie their business processes with their business objectives, which include improved revenue and operational efficiency," said Rod Favaron, president and CEO of Lombardi Software. "By managing, monitoring and optimizing their processes, they're removing process latency, reducing costs, resolving supplier and customer issues and plugging revenue leaks." Business processes typically span multiple organizations and systems, creating process gaps that employees bridge with time-consuming, manual steps. To solve this problem, TeamWorks branches across various systems, gathering and delivering information from the right application at the right time so people spend their time on the process, not searching for data. Since most business processes require some level of human involvement to resolve process exceptions and respond to business events, TeamWorks can be used for processes throughout an enterprise.

Lombardi Releases TeamWorks 3.3 [source EAI Journal]

FileNET, a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, has introduced the Process Analyzer, a new reporting and analytics tool designed to help enterprises optimize their business operations and increase the returns they realize from their BPM investment. Using a graphical interface, the Process Analyzer provides visibility into business processes with comprehensive tracking metrics and reports. For customer service intense organizations, the Process Analyzer can help manage performance by analyzing key elements of business operations, such as the types of inquiries processed, processing cycle times, customer response times and productivity per employee. "An organization's processes and its ability to execute on those processes truly define its business performance," said Michael W. Harris, senior vice president, products and strategy for FileNET. "By enabling real-time reporting in an easy-to-use package, the Process Analyzer is the first solution to take BPM out of the back office and make it accessible for executives and line-of-business managers. The Process Analyzer is a powerful tool that enables enterprises to measure and prove the value of their business operations, respond more quickly to market demands and opportunities, develop best practices and continuously improve their operations."

FileNET Introduces Process Analyzer [source EAI Journal]

In late June 2002, Sun Microsystems and three partners introduced a proposed choreography standard aimed at filling in the gaps between existing orchestration technologies. Developed by Intalio, BEA Systems, SAP, and Sun, the Web Services Choreography Interface specification (WSCI)—pronounced "whiskey"—is an XML specification for the flow of messages between interacting Web services. WSCI is the first time you can look at orchestration in a useful way because it brings in the notion of anticipated behavior," Friedman of META Group says. Step-by-step, subprocess technologies like orchestration languages are absolutely necessary to automate business flows, but simply specifying the order of steps in a process is not enough.

Web Services Wars Take Artistic Turn

IDS Scheer the leading provider of business process excellence services and tools, today announced that IDS Scheer Inc., Philadelphia, USA, has extended its relationship with Intalio, a most important developer of business process management software. Through the agreement, IDS Scheer and Intalio will develop a joint solution to integrate the Intalio|n3 Business Process Management System into ARIS to offer a complete solution to design, implement, execute, and manage intra- and inter-enterprise processes using IDS Scheer's award-winning ARIS Tools. The announcement takes the IDS Scheer/Intalio partnership to the next step, reflecting a stronger technical integration between the companies' flagship products. IDS Scheer will leverage the Intalio technology to deliver a single solution, enabling its huge customer base to use ARIS, the market-leading software for business process modeling, to manage the entire business process lifecycle from the design and deployment of business processes, to their operative execution and optimization. The companies is also joining forces to provide marketing, sales, and support for the product worldwide. "We are looking forward to continuously growing our relationship with IDS Scheer, and leveraging the synergies between our products and expertise," commented Tom Meyer, CEO of Intalio. "By integrating the Intalio technology with the ARIS solution, we can bring our vision to IDS Scheer's global customer base, and help organizations around the world achieve efficiencies and reduce costs with 'straight-through' process deployment." The solution will enable customers to use ARIS to create executable business processes, including all the required system bindings and messaging for the collaboration of multiple process parties. These processes can be deployed across a wide range of enterprise applications and platforms to enable process-driven automation and collaboration throughout the lifecycle.

IDS Scheer and Intalio Extend Relationship to Develop Joint Business Process Management Solution [source IDS-Scheer]

The new business process modelling language (BPML) 1.0 specification will be given a kick-start with its first implementation in a new release of System Architect enterprise modelling tool from Popkin Software. BPML provides a formal approach to modelling end-to-end business processes. It also supports XML-based process definitions to help communication between multiple vendors' systems and modelling tools used for web services. It is developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) organisation, a large consortium of vendors and users that includes IBM, Hewlett Packard (HP), BEA, Sun and SAP, and modelling tools companies Rational, Casewise and Popkin. [BPML] is critical to web services because it defines how partners collaborate together," said Martin Owen, Popkin Software EMEA consulting service manager. "How do you know whether the system is going to operate if you don't consider the end-to-end architecture?"

BPML kick-start from System Architect [Source VNU and Popkin]

A proposal by Oracle that could help unify emerging specifications for orchestrating Web services met with a mostly positive reaction Thursday at a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium. The database vendor asked a W3C working group to form a new industry-wide working group whose charter would be to find consensus among a handful of emerging Web services standards for choreographing business-to-business transactions. Oracle said it was concerned that too many overlapping specifications, supported by various vendors, already exist. A number of choreography-related proposals have been proposed recently besides BPEL4WS and WSCI. Other proposals include WSCL (Web Services Conversation Language), BPML (Business Process Modeling Language), and ebXML BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema).

Proposal to unify Web services standards gets backing [source Infoworld]

The recently announced Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) is a platform for executing business processes so that they can be more easily reused and integrated with other processes. The specification enables simple execution of such processes in a web services environment. The first review of BPEL4WS suggests that the proposal is compatible with IBM and Microsoft products and therefore the proposed standard may receive de-facto support through adoption of these vendors' products. It is also apparent that almost all the features of BPEL4WS are already represented in the WfMC XPDL specification. However, there are numerous additional capabilities in the WfMC standards, such as Wf-XML, which is the process execution standard, that were not found in the specification announced by Microsoft and IBM. We believe that the WfMC standards are consistent with, but go far beyond those recently announced by these vendors.

WfMC speaks out on BPEL4WS [source WfMC]

A brighter day is breaking as a slew of technologies are making "straight-through processing" and real-time applications more affordable and pervasive. Going forward, Web services promise to have a dramatic impact by easing application integration and delivering real-time information to places that batch data couldn't reach. In the meantime, technologies for connecting applications, data, and users -- and technologies for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing real-time business processes -- have already made major strides. "You need a set of technologies that allows you to manage the state of the process," says Stefan Van Overtveldt, IBM program director for WebSphere technology marketing in White Plains, N.Y. If a customer changes an order while the product is being built on the factory floor, for example, a set of pre-established processes based on business rules can respond (such as "redirect other inventory to this customer based on customer priority"). Those processes can be designed and modified graphically, Overtveldt says, and the process model can be kept separate from the underlying IT implementation.

Dawn of the real-time (process) enterprise [source Infoworld]

Fortune 500 companies must face the facts: Their ability to generate shareholder value depends heavily on how effectively they execute business processes. The more efficient their processes, the more revenue and profit they generate. But they face a huge challenge. Consider what the typical Fortune 500 company is up against. They must manage and optimize more than core processes and more than 2000 related sub-processes to run their business. AMR estimates that less than 10% of enterprise applications are integrated into a dynamic framework that lets a company respond quickly to market condition changes.

Key concepts for business process optimization [source EAIJournal and LombardiSoftware]

Unlike earlier distributed computing technologies, Web services and XML give the software industry a chance to finally realize the "standardization dream" enjoyed by industries such as transportation and manufacturing, said Iona CTO Eric Newcomer. During his keynote speech at the XML Web Services One conference, Newcomer said that the proliferation of XML-based Web services standards and development -- particularly around application integration -- will enable software "mass assembly" on a wide scale. The era of process manufacturing is close at hand.

Iona CTO touts Web services 'standardization dream' [Source InfoWorld]

Tom Siebel sees an enterprise computing future that's dominated by automated business processes and that's based on best practices and applications delivered as Web services. In the not-so-distant future, applications will write themselves to conform to pre-established business processes, Siebel said.

No Future for individual applications [Source eWeek]

Business Process Management (BPM) technology enables government agencies to dismantle obsolete bureaucratic divisions by cutting the labor- and paper-intensive inefficiency from manual, back-end processes. Faster and auditable processes allow employees to do more in less time, reducing paper use as well as administrative overhead and resources. The BPM layer can manage change, one of government’s most difficult challenges. Organizational impediments such as size and complexity, contradictory policies and directives, and difficulty coordinating across organizational silos all contribute to the challenge of managing change. In fact, many projects fail because of these impediments, and because organizations do not understand the importance of managing change. BPM offers government agencies a compelling solution.

Business Process Management — the Key to Efficient Government [Aberdeen Group]

BPM is a technology that helps writing complex applications, it is part of the application model as Intalio put it when it founded BPMI.org, it is a component that enables corporations to run and manage the process-oriented business logic of the their applications at a common level as opposed to the current situation where this type of business logic is buried in code in all applications. So how does this application model look like today? How is BPM is positioned in the application model? The current forces when designing new applications are two fold: a) every application must be able to evolve rapidly -this is not so new-, b) most applications cannot be developed in isolation, they must integrate readily with their environment (typically other applications) -this is rather new, as the cost of ownership and the value of the application both strongly depend on how well they integrate with their environment.

The End in Mind and The Infrastructure Battle [source ebpml.org]