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:

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?

Web Services in their simplest incarnation support only stateless communication between a requester and a provider. Many services are potentially long running, and contingencies for alternative service invocation or service failure have to be provided. For this reason, a number of Web Services Choreography standards are currently being developed, for instance BPEL or WS-C. We take a look at the current state of the standards field, and compare the history and outcome of the different standardization efforts. This is an exploratory case study, motivated by two observations. First, that the current interest in web services is directing attention to issues that have a longer history in the workflow community. Second, that the debate over web services choreography standards appears to be deeply influenced by architectural style, understood by relatively few. We started with one question – whether the technical debate has merit and should be better understood by a wider community. We also ask whether the battle is only about the technology. We found answers to both questions…

• zur Muehlen, Michael; Nickerson, Jeffrey V.; Swenson, Keith D.: Developing Web Services Choreography Standards – The Case of REST vs. SOAP. Decision Support Systems 40 (2005) 1, pp. 9-29.

At the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia, Trevor Naidoo (IDS Scheer, BPMI, ABPMP) and Michael zur Muehlen (Stevens Institute of Technology, WfMC) spoke about the current state and the future of BPM standards. With the merger of BPMI and the Object Management Group you can expect some changes to the landscape of standards bodies, but there still exists a proliferation of complementary, competitive, and overlapping standards in the BPM space. We are trying to shed some light on the focus areas of these standards, and what the consequences for users interested in BPM applications are today.

• You can download of the PDF of our presentation [here].
• Join the discussion on standards [here].