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| Mission BPMI.org (the Business Process Management Initiative) is a non-profit corporation that empowers companies of all sizes, across all industries, to develop and operate business processes that span multiple applications and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet. The Initiative's mission is to promote and develop the use of Business Process Management (BPM) through the establishment of standards for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization. BPMI.org develops open specifications, assists IT vendors for marketing their implementations, and supports businesses for using Business Process Management technologies. | |
| Context On the back-end, technology integration standards such as XML Schema, SOAP, and J2EE enable the convergence of legacy infrastructures toward process-oriented enterprise computing. On the front-end, emerging protocols such as ebXML, RosettaNet, and BizTalk support the process-level collaboration among business partners. BPMI.org leverages those converging trends by developing technologies that empower companies of all sizes, across all industries, to develop and operate business processes that span multiple applications and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet. BPMI.org defines open specifications, such as the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), and the Business Process Query Language (BPQL), that will enable the standards-based management of e-Business processes with forthcoming Business Process Management Systems (BPMS), in much the same way SQL enabled the standards-based management of business data with off-the-shelf Database Management Systems (DBMS). | |
| Scope BPMI.org considers an e-Business process conducted among two business partners as made of three parts: a Public Interface and two Private Implementations (one for each partner). The Public Interface is common to the partners and is supported by protocols such as ebXML, RosettaNet, and BizTalk. The Private Implementations are specific to every partner and are described in any executable language. BPML is one such language. Once developed, the Private Implementation of an e-Business process must be deployed on a platform that will actually execute it. For this purpose, BPMI.org defines BPQL, a standard management interface for the deployment and execution of e-Business processes. Furthermore, BPQL relies on UDDI in order to provide a standard way to register, advertise, and discover the Public Interfaces of e-Business processes. | |
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| Planning The first draft of the BPML specification has been submitted to members on August 14, 2000. Subsequent versions are currently being discussed and improved within BPMI.org. The latest draft was made available to the public on March 8, 2001. | |
| Organization BPMI.org has been established as a non-profit corporation within the state of California. The organization is headed by a five-member board of directors, along with an executive director. Specifications developed within BPMI.org are free for any organization to implement, extend, or modify. | |