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By Alexandra Weber Morales
July 15, 2008 —
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.”
Toronto-based Scott Ambler, practice leader for agile development at IBM Rational, says, “Including the human element in business process modeling is old hat. This was common in the 1970s and 1980s, although it dropped out of favor with the rise of object-oriented technologies and the reinvention of modeling. We're now rediscovering strategies from structured analysis and design and updating them for today's environment. This is definitely a step in the right direction.”
Moreover, modeling human tasks “solves a real problem,” he continues. “We build systems for people, and what they do are almost always a significant part of the overall business processes that we're trying to support. We need to be able to model how people use and interact with our systems. Otherwise, we'll never truly represent business processes.”
Cooking up a tempest
However, confusion has clouded support for BPEL4People, as commentators such as David Linthicum, a columnist for SD Times, and Fred Cummins, chairman of the OMG Business Modeling and Integration group, stir discontent over perceived limitations of the proposed standard.
Linthicum has taken aim at what he calls BPEL’s clunky additions of human tasks as part of the process, asserting that composites and workflows are preferable to Web service bindings and extensions.
In a February article titled, “OASIS BPEL4People: Beating a Dead Horse,” Cummins complained that BPEL “is designed for programmers, and BPEL4People won’t change that. ... BPEL may be acceptable for specification of processes that are internal to computer systems, but the design of BPEL forces a structure on business processes that is unnatural for business people.”
Whether in XML or graphical representation (which is not part of BPEL’s standard), non-programmers won’t grok process flows easily, according to Cummins. Not surprisingly, he posits that BPMN is the answer, because it “already has tasks for people and support for independent sub-processes. BPMN is now supported by BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel, also from OMG) with a computational model that extends BPMN to address choreography and support enterprise-level modeling of business processes, including support for service-oriented architecture (SOA).”
All this may be moot, OMG’s Soley contends. “I haven't seen any out-and-out battle between the groups. BPMN is well established in the marketplace, with about 50 commercial implementations from large, medium-size and small vendors, and an open-source implementation from Eclipse Foundation. There are tens of thousands of users; professional certification (under our own OCEB program) becoming available in a few months; and universities teaching BPMN to technical people, enterprise architects and business students.”
More important than the growing BPMN ecosystem, however, is the diversity of the market: Most BPMN products directly support delivery in BPEL runtimes, according to Soley, “as well as directly executive BPMN, or generating UML, or generating programming language code in C++, C#, Java, COBOL or other languages. So I'd say the standards will coexist for a long time.”
What’s more, it may well be that the fragmented BPM will benefit from those complementary standards as they help the field attract mainstream adherents. In a recent blog posting, BPM analyst Bruce Silver wrote, “The world of BPMS is divided into BPEL-lovers and BPEL-haters, and the thing that BPEL-haters seem to hate most is that the OASIS standard ‘excludes’ human tasks.” Plugging that hole is exactly what BPEL4People and its corollary WS-Human Task plan to do.
Enthusiastic ISVs
In the real world, coexistence is crucial. Version 2.0 of the BPMN standard is currently drafted within the OMG, and one of its goals is to standardize the serialization format of BPMN, said Ismael Ghalimi, CEO and co-founder of Intalio, an open-source business process management system vendor. “Intalio participates in the review of the proposed drafts of BPMN 2.0,” he said. “We believe it is essential to standardize those aspects of BPM. We are looking forward to adopting a standard that focuses exclusively on the semantics of BPMN, rather than support both BPMN and other types of business processes.”
That statement aligns with the views of SAP’s Ivana Trickovic, a co-author of the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications and a member of the OASIS committee. “Parallel with the BPEL4People standardization activity, we would like to make sure this extension of BPEL and the related OMG work on BPMN are aligned so that human interactions can be modeled with BPMN as well,” she said in an April InfoQ interview.
According to Ghalimi, almost all of Intalio’s users are employing the BPEL4People implementation, which provides a complete service framework integrated with Intalio’s BPEL engine for managing user tasks, as well as an out-of-the-box user interface for task management.
“Some of our customers may use their own customized UI, as they typically already have their preferred UI technology,” Ghalimi says. “For example, NTT DATA Intramart is using all our framework, but they have integrated it with their own UI technology.”
Adobe, one of the BPEL4People specification authors, has inked support for the BPEL4People specifications into its LiveCycle ES product road map. According to the company’s Web site, “Adobe LiveCycle ES already incorporates key concepts defined within the specifications:
• Processes modeled using LiveCycle ES Workbench incorporate human tasks, including the ability to define how a task is assigned, escalated and responds to exceptions.
• LiveCycle Workspace ES Flex-based components rapidly build user interfaces compliant to the WS-HumanTask specification.
• External systems can invoke the Web services for Process Management and Task Management to invoke processes and query process and task status.”
Like Intalio, Adobe emphasizes the broad standards ecosystem, not the battle for BPM supremacy. The company usefully offers a crib sheet for those confused by the assorted languages and specs, dividing them into three groups: modeling, managing and executing human-driven business processes. While the new standards are beginning to fledge, it’s all too clear that the fractured BPM market will also benefit from the steady guidance of the OMG and OASIS.
Common ground
Taking a page from the Capability Maturity Model, OMG now offers a Business Process Maturity Model. “There is a body of best practices—that's essentially what a maturity model is, a questionnaire measuring organizations but which practices they follow,” Soley says. “And the BPMM spec is precisely that for business process modeling. The actual spec is 500-plus pages and not fun to read, but there's a good intro by Bill Curtis and John Alden in BPTrends.”
Whether it’s used to pierce umpteen layers of bureaucracy or enable seamless business process performance, that maturity will come in handy.
The former editor in chief of Software Development magazine and an award-winning journalist, contributing editor Alexandra Weber Morales writes about technology from the world headquarters of Morales Enterprises in Oakland.
Related Search Term(s): UML, Adobe, Microsoft
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