And given the importance of business process, and the new process platform that will replace ERP as the center of the business world, I think a few months is not too high a price to pay to get it right…. There is real business value here because wi…

Short story is that it is on track to to be voted on at the December meeting … it should get the vote to go ahead, the only issue being whether the UML Profile (which is currently a requirement, although may be dropped in this initial release) is ready.

Now from a public face, IBM has a lot invested in the UML transform from BPMN, hence the degree of evasiveness when you asked Steve about it.

There is quite a bit of value in BPDM, which will bring some amazing capabilities - especially when you factor in support for both choreography and orchestration.

I am writing a paper on the whole set of OMG based standards which should come out pretty soon. The BPM Steering Committee will discuss it next week … the BPM SC is the business face for BPM stds inside the OMG.

In the end, BPDM is a pretty comprehensive work, which I have also been dissecting to see whether it will support things like Role Activity Diagrams as well … which is all about the choreography of process (rather than the orchestration aspect which is where BPMN is).

Here is what I have currently penned about BPDM, which gives you an idea of what it is all about, and where it is up to.

BPDM provides a “meta-model” that enables the capture of semantic content from process models independent of the modeling notation. Think of it as a “universal syntax” of process. The central idea is that BPDM is capable of supporting a mapping to the semantics of most common types of process model and, as much as is possible, thereby enables the robust exchange of information between models of that type and other types of process models, while preserving the fidelity of the model content.

To achieve this goal, BPDM must support two fundamentally complementary views of process – orchestration and choreography:
• Orchestration is a term used to describe the traditional notion of sequential execution, where activities are carried out, with branching and synchronization of different threads.

• Choreography is a more “abstract” notion of process. It is used to describe the coordination of the roles involved.

Moreover, the semantic content of a process models is separated from its graphical markup (enabling greater clarity).

Because of this sophistication, BPDM can support a very wide range of usage scenarios. For example, it enables high level, abstract “business capability models” used in the boardroom, to exchange information with lower level, procedural modeling notations used in BPM projects, and then on into process execution environments (BPM Suites).

It could also facilitate the definition of complex inter-company business protocols (i.e. choreography). This model could be defined directly, or created through the composition of existing protocol fragments (from a library). The resulting model could then provide the terms of reference for each participants own internal orchestration model. In turn, this orchestration model could then be used to generate a robust BPEL execution model that directly supported the agreed choreography between the companies.

It is important to realize that these fundamentally different views of a process are based on different, yet related sets of semantic information. The point is that if these subtle differences are captured and mapped appropriately, then it becomes possible to effectively manage change—even down to capturing different scenarios, what-if analysis information and enabling rollback to previous versions.

In its initial form, BPDM is primarily intended to support the serialization of BPMN models. Work has already begun to develop a UML mapping, and a BPEL translation will be detailed in the appendices of the proposed standard.

The target audience for this standard are the business process modelling vendors and process execution vendors. Although important to the user community, it has no particular relevance to their day to day needs—i.e. the tools will either handle the translation or not.

At this point BPDM is going through the later stages of the OMG RFP process (Request For Proposal). The members of the work group are developing a joint submission that is due for presentation to the BMI Domain Task Force for review and acceptance at the December 2006 meeting in Washington. Thereafter, it goes to the Architecture Board for assessment and ratification. The standard will then be made available on the OMG web site (should be available by the end of January 2007).

It is already pretty much agreed by all parties that in the future, BPDM and what we now know as BPMN need to merge - become one and the same thing. BPMN has its own challenges - to better support the choreogfraphy side, to expand upwards to support a higher level notation for business modeling (if you like modeling business services or capabilities). And when Steve talks about BPMN 2.0, it is that effort that he is relating to.

Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion.