Jul 25 2007

Bigger is better? A look at the complexity of BPM standards

Posted by: Michael zur Muehlen in BPM, Standards

I am attending the BPM Think Tank in Burlingame this week, and there are many insightful presentations around emerging standards in the BPM space, such as BPDM, BPMM, BMM, BPMN 2.0 and OSRM. But one thing makes me wonder - with every revision, every iteration, the standard specifications grow in size. The new BPMM specification has a whopping 505 pages in draft version. A participant asked what the effect would be if the BPMN 2.0 specification, which combines BPMN and BPDM, would be a 1,000 page document. Nobody knows… I had a look at some older and newer specifications, and this is what I came up with:

Organization	Standard	Original Version			Update
Organization	Standard	Year	Version	Pages	Year	Version	Pages
IETF	FTP	1980	1.0	70
IETF	HTML	1995	1.0	60
IETF	HTTP	1996	1.0	60	1999	1.1	176
W3C	XML	2000	1.0	59
OMG	UML	2000	1.3	1034	2005	2.0	710
OASIS	BPSS	2001	1.01	136
W3C	WSCL	2002	1.0	22
W3C	WSDL	2002	1.2	30
OASIS	BPEL	2003	1.1	136	2007	2.0 (draft)	276
W3C	SOAP	2003	1.2	128
WfMC	XPDL	2003	1.0	87	2005	2.0	164

There are some interesting observations to make:

Standard specifications seem to double between versions. The only exception is UML, which actually shrank 300 pages between versions 1.3 and 2.0
Some organizations produce shorter specifications than others. For example, IETF specifications seem to be rather concise, compared to OMG or OASIS specifications.

Now, counting pages is not a very exact metric to gauge the complexity of a specification, but it is safe to assume that a 300 page specification is significantly more complex than a 60 page specification. I brought this up at the Think Tank, and it was suggested that specs grow because the working groups add clarifications and explanations. But it is also possible that as the standard specs grow, the effort to implement them and to prove conformance with all aspects of a specification increases significantly. If that is the case, do bigger standards keep the industry from advancing?

Tags: BPM, complexity, specification, Standards

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One Response to “Bigger is better? A look at the complexity of BPM standards”

Jan Recker says:
July 25th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Michael,

this is indeed an interesting observation. I would agree that while a page count surely isn’t an overly adequate measure of complexity, it nevertheless makes me worry. Even if the extra pages are devoted to explanations and clarifications, wouldn’t it be easier to make the specification less ambiguous, more succinct and more readily understandable in the first place?
While the whole issue may sound rather minor, I believe specification complexity is an important issue that vendors and standardization bodies should carefully consider. When we consider how innovations diffuse and are accepted and adopted by end users - there has been a lot of research in this area, most notably Roger’s theory of innovation diffusion (just google it…) - we find that concepts such as user-friendliness, ease of learning and adoption curves are crucial for a successful uptake. In my opinion, standardization should not only be technology- and specification-oriented. What is lacking in the current standardization efforts in the BPM industry, is very simply an end user focus.
Admittedly, there has not been too much research into BPM end user behaviour either, but hopefully we can contribute to this aspect in the future, and hopefully vendors and standardization bodies will choose to listen…