Essential Business Process Modeling

OMG: Model-Driven BPM

Established in 1989, the Object Management Group (OMG, http://www.omg.org), is a consortium of more than 500 companies, and is best known for its standards-based work on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), UML, and MDA. Though CORBA’s popularity has been declining ever since its boom in the mid-1990s, UML continues to thrive after more than a decade, and the newborn MDA is enjoying burgeoning press coverage and vendor interest.

The OMG recently has taken an interest in BPM, publishing Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for the specification of abstract models for business process diagrams and business process runtime interfaces.^[*] The RFP process—to be managed by the OMG’s Business Enterprise Integration Domain Task Force (BEIDTF) , headed by EDS and Hendryx Associates—is in its early stages, but its intriguing feature is not the competition of bids, but the type of solution being sought. The OMG wants an MDA for BPM—a mutually beneficial arrangement, because not only is BPM a compelling example of an MDA, MDA promises to be a boon to BPM.

Members of the OMG include AT&T, BEA, Borland, Boeing, CA, Citigroup, Compaq, Compuware, Ericsson, Ford, Fujitsu, Glaxo Smith Kline, HP, Hitachi, Hyperion, IBM, IONA, Microsoft, NASA, NEC, Oracle, Pfizer, Rational, SAP, SAS, Siemens, Sprint, Sun, and Unisys.

Model-Driven Architecture

MDA is, in a sense, a means of unifying disparate approaches to a given software problem. Software has seemingly countless types ...