BUSINESS PROCESSES AND THE OMG
An Overview
The OMG is rapidly emerging as a major business process standards organization. This process
began when the OMG committed itself to the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in 2001. MDA
seeks to integrate a wide-variety of different analysis and modeling approaches. Figure 1, for
example, provides an overview of how MDA is organized and aligned. While each organization
that uses the MDA approach is free to develop just those models it needs for its own purposes,
many organizations will seek to create business process models. Some of these models will be
created as CIM models and others will be created on the PIM or PSM levels to support the
implementation of business processes.
ComputationIndependent Model
(CIM)
Created by Business
Analysts to Describe
Business Processes
CIM >> PIM
Mapping
PlatformIndependent Model
(PIM)
Created by Architect/
Designer to Describe
Architecture
PIM >> PSM
Mapping
Platform-Specific
Model
(PSM)
Created by Developer or Tester
to Implement Solution
PSM >> Code
Mapping
Code
Figure 1. The Creation of MDA Systems.
In committing to MDA, the OMG has implicitly committed itself to working with individuals and
groups to define a variety of CIM and PIM metamodels. Some will be generic models that can be
used to capture information about business processes and others will be industry specific process
models that will be used by companies within a single industry. Thus, any company that is
interested in a process-centric management approach and seeks to organize its IT resources to
support specific business process goals will want to consider using MDA to assure alignment and
traceability from business processes to IT resources.
Three major OMG initiatives, at the moment, involve defining a metamodel for generic business
processes (The Business Process Definition Metamodel), defining metamodels for business rules
(Business Semantics of Business Rules, and Production Rule Representation) and defining an
Ontology Definition Metamodel.
The OMG’s Business Process Definition Metamodel would allow groups using a variety of
process models, including UML activity diagrams, UML uses case diagrams, and new process
modeling notations, like the BPMI organization’s BPMN, to map to a common metamodel and
thus facilitate communication among themselves. (The BPD metamodel will be a profile of UML
2.0.) Similarly, business rule metamodels will facilitate the integration of business rule systems
with other business models and with workflow systems. (See Figure 2.)
UML 2.0
BPMN
Other...
Business Process Definition Metamodel
Information
Process
Resource
J2EE
BPEL4WS
Other...
Figure 2. The BP Definition Metamodel will serve as a common link
between alternative notations and implementation languages.
Similarly, the OMG is working to standardize business rules, and assure that they are compatible
with the business process metamodel. This and future work will rely on MDA constructs to
introduce a new level of compatibility among models used by those working in the business
process arena, and between business process models and software models.
The OMG also has a task force that is considering how to create an Ontology Definition
Metamodel that organizations can use to guide vocabulary standardization efforts. The Ontology
Definition Metamodel will probably also be used in conjunction with emerging business rule
standards.
In addition to these efforts, the OMG has an ongoing relationship with the Workflow
Management Coalition (WfMC) and has produced a joint Workflow specification that is used by
many companies active in workflow development. Similarly the OMG has agreed to exchange
memberships with BPMI.org and BPMI.org.
The OMG’s MDA work is also closely related to a variety of Enterprise Architecture initiatives
that incorporate business process models within a broader framework.
There is also a lot of discussion of XML-based business process languages at the moment. Such
a language could be used, for example, to help a company specify a virtual process that required
that information be shared among different activities running at different locations. The
candidate that seems to have attracted the most attention at the moment is the BPEL4WS standard
that was originally drafted by BEA, IBM and Microsoft and which is now being formalized by a
committee at OASIS. As BPEL is more widely used, companies will want to align BPEL models
with other process and software models. The IBM led BPD metamodel proposal has already
defined a mapping from UML to BPEL4WS.
In addition to its generic business modeling initiatives, industry specific task force groups at the
OMG are considering formalizing business models that can be used to align processes and
software components within specific domains. The paper, TeleManagement Forum White Paper
on NGOSS and MDA, for example, provides an example of how the telecom industry is linking
MDA to its business process framework (eTOM/NGOSS).
There is a growing movement to document processes and link specific process activities to the
underlying IT applications and databases that implement the processes. MDA is the only generic,
open approach that is designed to facilitate such a comprehensive, integrated approach. Thus, the
OMG will be increasingly involved standardizing metamodels in the business process space to
assure that business models can be integrated with software models.
The Business Process Corner pulls together a number of OMG initiatives that all develop or
support Business Processes. It was created to make it easy for business managers and business
analysts to quickly locate new articles of interest.
[BPTrends logo] BPTrends is a website edited by Paul Harmon that publishes a wide variety of
information on business process. A number of articles are posted on BPTrends concerning OMG
initiatives. For example, David Frankel, manages a monthly column on the BPTrends site where
articles are published on MDA. Several pointers in the OMG Business Process Corner lead to
BPTrends articles, but readers may want to visit the site to explore it for other articles that might
interest them. (www.bptrends.com)