Phil Gilbert was up next for a brief talk on the role of OMG’s BPM steering committee, which he chairs, as a lead-in to the more detailed discussions of OMG’s BPM standards to come.
He discussed how the steering committee started as BPMI.org in 2001, which released the first BPMN specification prior to BPMI being merged into OMG in 2005. The steering committee provides a platform around which input to standards can be gathered — specifically BPMN, BPDM and SBVR — but doesn’t actually vote on passing the standards. Ever since I was involved in satellite image standards back in the 80’s, I’ve never really understood how standards bodies work in their entirety, but am thankful for people like Phil who get in there and do the heavy lifting.
He covered their roadmap:
- BPMN 1.1 (available now)
- BPDM 1.0 (just released)
- Merging BPMN and BPDM into BPMN 2.0, so that if you support fully support BPMN, you will support BPDM as well
- Working on the relationships between the OMG standards and UML, XPDL and BPEL
- OSM 1.0 for organization modeling (later this year)
- SBVR 1.0 for rules
- BPRI 1.0 for the runtime interface to processes
He finished with a great point: as more of these standards become baked into process-related products, the idea that you have to work with a single vendor — much less a single product — will become obsolete.