Re: [ebxml-dev] BPMI?

[bhaugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

From: Jean-Jacques Dubray

>BPSS contains two things: a) a protocol which sits on top of the MS
>protocol and b) a collaboration specification based on the concept of
>choreographed business transactions. The protocol is inside the
business
>transaction.

If your point in the preceding paragraph was to differentiate
between business transaction and business collaboration layers,
I agree.  But then I get confused...

>A BPMS should not deal with protocol level semantics, in other words it
>is not here to enforce/implement the protocol. This is actually the
role
>of the BSI layer as proposed in the BPSS spec and well documented by
>Stephano Pogliani.

1. What does "BPMS" mean?  Business Process Management System?
Does it live on top of the transaction layer?
2. Last time I talked to Stephano, he was not making a distinction
between transaction and collaboration layers - and his BSI document
also contained mappings to internal business apps.
3. The latest BPSS is ambiguous:
"It is anticipated that over time BSI software will evolve to the point
of monitoring and managing the state of a collaboration, similar to the
way a BSI today is expected to manage the state of a transaction. For
the immediate future, such capabilities are not expected and not
required."

>However, if you get rid of the protocol you still have a flow of
>information (request/response and exceptions generated by the BSI based
>on the analysis of the protocol).

Do I understand correctly that you do *not* mean literally
to "get rid of" the transaction protocol, but only to delegate
it to a different software component?

>What I propose is that BPML support at the metamodel level the concepts
>of business transactions and collaboration. Isn't a business process a
>series of coordinated collaborations (with partners, with enterprise
>systems, and with users) ?

Makes sense to me...

>Don't get me wrong, I would like to see BPML to succeed, I am just
>trying to point at the past and show that BPML suffers the same lack of
>vision that a WfMC or OMG has had (I need to catch up on UML 2.0 to see
>where the OMG is going). It is actually amazing to me that each group
>(WfMC, BPMI, EDOC, OMG MS, IBM...) consciously omits one or more side
of
>the problem. BPML acts just as if B2B did not exist. Aren't 90% of
>enterprise processes driven by some kind of customer, supplier or
>channel partner interaction?

Exactly.  But then some people complain (justifiably) that
ebXML ignores internal business systems...

-Bob Haugen