Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI)
What is the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI)?
Established in August 2000, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) is a nonprofit organization that exists to promote the standardization of common business processes, as a means of furthering e-business and B2B development. It has since merged with the Object Management Group (OMG).
BPMI was founded by a group of 16 e-business analysts and industry leaders, including the following:
- Aventail
- Black Pearl
- Blaze Software
- Bowstreet
- Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
- Computer Sciences Corporation
- Cyclone Commerce
- DataChannel
- Entricom Intalio
- S1 Corporation
- Versata
- VerticalNet
- Verve
- XMLFund
What is the history of the Business Process Management Initiative?
After its inception, the group grew to include more than 80 companies. BPMI's stated mission was "to promote and develop the use of Business Process Management (BPM) through the establishment of new standards for business process modeling, process design, deployment, execution, maintenance and optimization."
By so doing, the BPMI methodology facilitates enterprise interoperability and further develops the global marketplace.
Currently, e-business reflects the idiosyncratic ways that business processes work within an organization. There are, for example, redundant data, incompatible process flows and outdated management systems across organizations.
The goal of the BPMI initiative -- and business process management today -- is to overcome these problems, and make it possible for business users across organizations to communicate more effectively, enhance data flow and share applications.
What are the components of BPMI?
The BPMI model of any two-way e-business process involves three main components: the public interface and two private implementations.
The public interface, which is the area of interaction between two business partners, is supported by various protocols such as those associated with BizTalk, ebXML and RosettaNet.
The model further defines two private implementations, which are specific to the individual partners involved and can be described in any executable language.
The Initiative specified such a language, Business Process Modeling Language (BPML). BPML is an XML-based META-language that can be used to model components of business processes in the same way that XML can be used to model components of business data.
An associated query language, Business Process Query Language (BPQL) was developed by Initiative members as a standard management interface that can be used to deploy and execute defined business processes.
Both BPML and BPQL are open specifications. The OMG continues to develop and promote open standards specific to particular e-business needs.
BPMI and the OMG
In 2005, the BPMI and the OMG publicly announced the merger of their business automation, business rules and other BPM modeling tools. These include the following:
- BPMI's Business Process Modeling Notation which can map to Unified Modeling Language or Business Process Execution Language;
- OMG's Business Process Definition Metamodel;
- business language, workflow vocabulary and rules;
- business information management;
- enterprise application integration; and (EAI)
- web services processes such as WS-BPEL from OASIS, WSDL and XML Schema;
- security management;
- Business Process Modeling Language; and
- business process query language.
