Standardising on workflow-management—the OMG workflow management facility

Abstract

With over 800 members, the Object Management Group (OMG) is the largest international consortium of the software industry. Its goal is not only to promote the use of object technology in general but also to define and standardise on a common architectural framework across heterogeneous hardware platforms and operating systems, called the Object Management Architecture (OMA) [13]. In the standardisation process, the OMG focuses on commercially available object technology. So far, the OMG's efforts have been very successful; most of the specifications have met broad acceptance and are implemented by commercial products. Since 1995, the OMG has followed the plan to extend their reference architecture (see [13,18,36]) with a component that supports workflow management. OMG technology, especially the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), and workflow management primarily address the same target users: large, distributed organisations with heterogeneous IT platforms. Therefore, it is quite obvious that a big synergy grows out of the integration of both technologies in building large-scale enterprise solutions.The promotion of workflow management standards is also the goal of another international body, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [3,31]. Since 1993, the WIMC has produced a number of specifications, mainly an interface model together with interface specifications for workflow management systems [32,33,34,35]. The OMG always assumed that the WIMC standards would fit nicely into the OMA. But in late 1996 it was recognized [23] that the interfaces of the WfMC specifications do not fit seemlessly into the OMG model and that the WfMC will probably fall to meet OMG's expectations (see also [19,22]). Therefore, in January 1997, the OMG Common Facility Task Force voted to reject the WfMC's motion to submit their standards to OMG on a fast-track approval process rather than going through the usual OMG standardisation procedure. The usual OMG process is based on a RFP (Request For Proposals) seeking for submissions for a particular area of standardisation. In almost all cases several submissions emerge which are combined into one revised submission. This submission is voted on and in case of a positive vote adopted by OMG. In early 1997, the OMG established the Workflow workgroup [30] with the charter to create and issue an RFP for an OMG Workflow Management Facility (WfMF). In May 1997, the RFP [15] was issued, asking the software industry for submissions for this new architectural component.This report gives a brief overview of the architectural context, the requirements of the RFP and a short evaluation of the initial submissions. An outlook to potential topics for future workflow RFPs that are collected in a Workflow roadmap document concludes the report.

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