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The first standardisation effort in workflow was the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). The WfMC started in 1993. A very interesting publication of the WfMC is the reference model. It defines the interfaces between a workflow management system and other actors. Another piece of work is the XPDL specification. XPDL defines an XML schema for specifying the declarative part of a workflow. In my opinion, the reference model and XPDL are the best specifications
JSR 207: Process Definition for Java - This is an initiative of the Java Community Process (JCP) that standardizes how to automate business processes on a J2EE server. The basic model of this JSR is to define a special type of ejb session bean that acts as the interface for a business process. The JSR wants to standardize a set of XML meta tags that should be specified as meta data (JSR175). The JSR207 compliant ejb-container then takes the session bean and the meta data as input and generates code that binds the methods together as specified in the meta data. This specification is still in an early phase, no publications have been made yet. The expert group was formed in March 2003.
WfMC's XPDL - The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is a consortium of about 300 that defines a set of related standards based on an interesting reference model. The reference model describes the relation between a WFMS and other actors in a use case fashion. XPDL is the specification of WfMC that specifies an XML grammar the control flow of business processes.
ebXML's BPSS - ebXML is a set of related standards for business collaboration. Main focus is on communication between different companies. This can be seen as the successor of EDI. ebXML is a joint initiative of OASIS and UN/CEFACT. BPSS is the specification of ebXML that is closest to the concepts described in this article.
BPMI's BPML & WSCI - (Intalio, Sun, SAP, ...). BPMI also has defined a specification (BPMN) that describes how the 'executional' business processes should be visually represented.
BPEL - (Microsoft, BEA, IBM, SAP & Siebel) BPEL is the specification that results from a set of specifications based on message exchange: XLANG, WSFL, BPML. Also a proposal is being made that hooks this specification to Java: BPELJ. Instead of modelling the states of a process. This specification says how to create a reaction upon an incoming message. So this is not a specification for formal definition of business processes as laid out in this article. Simplified this can be seen as a programming language that is expressed in XML and that provides the control flow constructs for combining WSDL-services. As the name suggests, this specification is focussed (to be exact 'not limited to') to web services.
OMG's Workflow management facility - Is based upon the WfMC specifications and defines how this gets translated into CORBA.
UML - UML defines 9 types of diagrams for modelling and designing software systems. Each diagram type defines a visual representation and semantics for the things you can draw. One type of diagram, the activity diagram, has as a goal to specify how business processes should be visually represented. Note that with the 4 layers of a process definition, I tried to show that a process definition is more then just its visual representation. UML only specifies the visual part.
RosettaNet - RosettaNet mainly defines a set of Partner Interface Processes (PIP). A PIP specifies a process between 2 trading partners, including the message formats.
UBL - The Universal Business Language (UBL) defines a standard library of XML documents to be used for communication between different organizations. This can be seen as complementary to ebXML since ebXML only defines the infrastructure to set up inter-organization processes. This standard is competing with a subset of the RosettaNet standard. The RosettaNet PIP's define a set of processes between trading partners, including the message format. The message formats of the RosettaNet PIP's are at the same level as UBL.
Conclusion
I have shown in this article that the workflow market is still young and wild but that there are already solid tools out there:
Only now, mature integration platforms such as J2EE and .NET are available. Running a WFMS on such a platform really boosts their added value. That is why only recently the workflow systems have been rediscovered.
In 'The case for workflow' we showed actually how the introduction of workflow management systems delivers return on investment, both at the technical and the business level.
The positioning of workflow in the technology hype-curve shows that the concepts used in BPM and workflow management still need to settle.
The section 'open source projects' and commercial vendors lists a variety of tools that are eager to bring you all the benefits of workflow and business process management.
The conclusion we can extract from all this is that
Specifications are not yet mature, no standards have been adopted on a broad scale
Comparing workflow tools is the hardest challenge today for companies that embrace the BPM ideas
Despite the fact that standardisation still might take a while, good workflow management systems are already available. That is a real incentive for organizations to dive already into the tool-selection process.
I hope that I have stimulated your interest in workflow and gave you on the right background for making an effective comparison. |
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