It has been a while since I given an update on the work of the WfMC Technical Committee. The last couple of months has been busy, and this is all building toward two standards tutorial events: one in DC and one in London. Before we get to that, it has been a busy couple of months:

XPDL 2.1 – A new update to this specification due to the hard work of a number of people contributing and painstakingly edited and assembled by Robert Shapiro. The WfMC working group 1 met in Nashville and voted for adoption of the 2.1 spec as it is. The new version contains extensions to support BPMN 1.1 (also just released) and include a new section on conformance testing. This is an important step because it allows us to specify several levels of conformance, and a way to measure which level you are at. Bruce Silver contributed significantly to this approach. Tom Laverty from Global 360 developed an XSLT script for performing the test. All in all, it is another step forward in the WfMC effort to allow for a process design ecosystem.

BPAF – A new acronym is born. The Workflow Reference Model describes interface 5 which is a way for events and other historical information to be passed to an analytical tool for processing and mining. At the Nashville meeting a decision was made to call this “Business Process Analytics Format”. This is a standard XML structure which a BPMS can generate, and Process Intelligence product can consume in order to product high quality analytics. Of course many such tools can be programmers to take a stream of event in any format, but a standardized format will allow us to fine tune the precise semantic meaning of each attribute of the event, and make it far easier to hook various types of process engines together without programming. There is a working group led by Michael zur Muehlen and Shane Gabie.

Wf-XML – Main focus on creating a new RESTful version of this specification in cooperation with Open Geospatial Consortium. Find out more about this at GeoBlicki.

Events – there have been a number of successful BPM tutorial events:

• Las Vegas, Feb 2008, BPM In Practice at Gartner BPM Summit drew a full room of 60+ people for this three hour tutorial by Keith Swenson and Robert Shapiro
• Nashville, Feb 2008, BPM In Practice at the BPM Tech Show was a repeat success with the three hour tutorial. This one was recorded and is being turned into a book!

Future Events – please mark your calendars, the following:

• Washington DC, April 21, 2008, at Architecture & Process 2008
  A full day BPM Standards Tutorial given by the entire team of WfMC BPM experts. This is also the location of the next WfMC Member Meeting April 22-24.
• London England, May 1, 2008, BPM In Practice Special Event
  First time in England for this venerable tutorial series, and timed to be the day after the Gartner BPM Summit in downtown London. A full day session to catch up on the most important standards for BPM Technology today. Get your reservations early.