I had the opportunity to spend a week in sunny Brisbane, Australia, to attend the 5th International Conference on Business Process Management, the largest academic conference in the BPM space. Hajo A. Reijers and I presented a paper on the use of biological mechanisms for task allocation, which are particularly useful in the emergency response domain (you can download the paper in the publications section here).Today I gave a two hour tutorial on the state of BPM standards, which was very well attended. The emerging landscape of integration, choreography, notation, and interchange standards in the BPM field are both confusing for practitioners and a fertile research field for researchers. Thankfully there are some efforts from standards groups to clarify the scope of their efforts and the impact of their specifications. I had a chance to talk to Karsten Ploesser of SAP, one of the co-authors of the BPEL4People draft specification, which is emerging as a very focused document, which will probably make it easier to understand and implement in practice - one key aspect that affects the adoption and diffusion of standards.Since I received a large number of requests for the presentation slides I made them available on slideshare. You can download the PDF of the presentation here and an audio recording is available here. 

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Update: All slides from the BPM 2007 conference are available for download here: http://bpm07.fit.qut.edu.au/program/index.jsp 

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.