Talking the business process language

Citation

(2003), "Talking the business process language", Work Study, Vol. 52 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2003.07952caf.008

Talking the business process language

Standards bodies (and of course software suppliers) are putting the finishing touches to a number of Web services specifications that could have a significant impact on the ways in which firms collaborate. The standards relate to XML, a language used by businesses to model enterprise data that has become an instrumental part of Web services. The developing standards mark up data similarly to XML, but add a range of new capabilities.

The Business Process Markup Language (BPML) is published by the Business Process Management Initiative, a group backed by many of the major IT vendors, including BEA Systems, CSC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. The first draft was released last August. Compared with XML, BPML lets users model a company's business processes from top to bottom.

BPML is designed to do for processes what spreadsheets did to data: let companies treat them as definable objects that can be linked to other processes.

It allows a company to define every action in a complex business process, from sending a price bid to executing a purchase and shipping goods. If every company does this, then processes become manageable over organisational boundaries.

Companies that want to collaborate on an order, a project, or a transaction can interact at the process level to perform different parts of common procedures.

As ever, however, things are never straightforward in the "standards" world. A consortium of businesses, including BEA (yes, the same one), IBM and Microsoft, is developing a rival standard, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL). The first draft was also born in August, when IBM and Microsoft brought together IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft's XLANG to create the new standard.

IBM suggests that the specification is similar to technologies such as Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Java.

ODBC and Java Database Connectivity provide a standard way of talking to a database, independent from the developer that produces it. The same thing has occurred in application development and application servers with Java 2 Enterprise Edition. But in the business-process arena, this has so far not been possible.

Of course, having two standards (BPEL and BPML) is not ideal – and the chances are that some compromise will be done and the two standards will merge.

Currently, software vendors are building products that exploit one of the various standards. Siebel Systems has already built support for IBM's WSFL into its Universal Application Network, a Web services-based system that integrates its customer relationship management software into other applications.

Along with Microsoft, Siebel is pushing BPEL as the key standard. Versions of the Universal Application Network due next year will support the specification.

CSC will later this year release a version of its e3 architecture that will include a business-process management engine capable of interpreting BPML. IBM also is planning to use the technology.