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Modeling gets a human touch


By Alexandra Weber Morales


 Alexandra Weber Morales
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July 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 4)
Despite its decade-long success as a vendor-supported standard, pundits have pummeled the Unified Modeling Language in recent years. The rise of agility prompted many development teams to choose whiteboard-driven face time over formal modeling, even as UML was deepening its reach into tools via model-driven architecture.

Fueling the anti-UML zeitgeist, Microsoft touted its domain-specific languages as an alternative. In 2005, the Object Management Group merged with BPMI.org, forming the Business Process Modeling Notation standards organization. With the human element now permeating the modeling industry, it appears the OMG was wisely following the flow.

OMG chairman Richard Mark Soley said that OMG has become increasingly vertical. Indeed, about 85% of today’s OMG activity is in markets such as healthcare, finance, telecom and manufacturing. And the focus is on business processes and process maturity, such as the BPM Maturity Model standard published this year, he added.

Relief arrived recently for UML adherents, too. In what many view as a conciliatory move, Microsoft’s Bill Gates announced last month that UML would reappear in Visual Studio 10, reversing several years of domain-specific language exclusivity in the IDE. While all might appear calm, a new storm is gathering strength in the BPM world, blowing in from the Web services front.

Power to the people
Modeling the human element is nothing new. Three years ago, a white paper published by IBM and SAP proposed the Web Services-Business Process Execution Language Extension for People (BPEL4People), which extended the XML-based BPEL to include situations in which a handoff occurs between human and machine.

In June 2007, Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle and SAP published BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask as a follow-up to the white paper. This was designed to ensure the portability of human tasks, among other things.
 
In the last year, those specifications have gone to an OASIS technical committee, which is charged with solidifying the proposed BPEL4People and WS-Human Task standards. Not everyone agrees that these complementary standards will play well with others, such as the OMG’s BPMN, though most concur that the human element is more than just a fad.
 
“A business process modeling solution that doesn’t model human parts of the process isn’t too useful: Building a service-oriented enterprise requires capturing and precisely defining business processes, and many—in some cases, most—business processes in real organizations are human processes. UML wasn't intended for that purpose, but BPMN sure was,” Soley says. “It’s the biggest differentiator between UML and BPMN.”



Related Search Term(s): UML, Adobe, Microsoft

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