Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) was a

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...

formed to define

standards Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...

for the interoperability of

workflow A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of ...

management systems. The coalition was disbanded in 2019 and no longer exists.

History

The Coalition was founded in May 1993 with original members including IBM,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

, ICL, Staffware and approximately 300 software and services firms in the business software sector. Over its history, the WfMC had four chairpersons: The WfMC regarded its work as complete as of 2019 and is now accordingly disbanded, while all WfMC-supported awards are now closed. The successful conclusion of its work is reflected in numerous frameworks, standards and languages in the workflow and business process space.

Standards work

Since its founding, the use of

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

has become more widespread. The Coalition's focus was principally around the process definition file interchange, using the standard XML Process Definition Language (XPDL).

Workflow Reference Model

The Workflow Reference Model was published first in 1995 and still forms the basis of most business process management (BPM) and workflow software systems in use today. It was developed from the generic workflow application structure by identifying the interfaces which enable products to interoperate at a variety of levels. All workflow systems contain a number of generic components which interact in a defined set of ways; different products will typically exhibit different levels of capability within each of these generic components. To achieve interoperability between workflow products a standardised set of interfaces and data interchange formats between such components is necessary. A number of distinct interoperability scenarios can then be constructed by reference to such interfaces, identifying different levels of functional conformance as appropriate to the range of products in the market. Other WfMC standards make reference to this model.

XPDL (XML Process Definition Language)

XPDL is an XML based language for describing a process definition, developed by the WfMC. The goal of XPDL is to store and exchange the process diagram, allowing one tool to model a process diagram, another to read the diagram and edit, yet another to "run" the process model on an XPDL-compliant BPM engine, and so on. It is not a compiled executable programming language like

BPEL The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Process ...

, but specifically a process design format that literally represents the "drawing" of the process definition process syntax of business process models, as well as extended product attributes. Thus it has ‘XY' or vector coordinates, including lines and points that define process flows. This allows an XPDL to store a one-to-one representation of a BPMN process diagram. For this reason, XPDL is effectively the file format or "serialization" of

BPMN Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model. Originally developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), BPMN has been maintained by the Ob ...

, as well as any non-BPMN design method or process models which use in their underlying definition the XPDL

meta-model A metamodel or surrogate model is a model of a model, and metamodeling is the process of generating such metamodels. Thus metamodeling or meta-modeling is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and ...

. There are presently about 60 tools which use XPDL for storing process models.

Versions

* Version 1.0 was released in 2002. * Version 2.0 was released in Oct 2005. * In spring 2012, the WfMC completed XPDL 2.2 as the ''fifth'' revision of this specification. XPDL 2.2 builds on version 2.1 by introducing support for the process modeling extensions added to BPMN 2.0.

BPSim

The Business Process Simulation framework is a standardized specification that allows business process models captured in either BPMN or XPDL to be augmented with information in support of rigorous methods of analysis. It defines the parameterization and interchange of process analysis data allowing structural and capacity analysis of process models. BPSim is meant to support both pre-execution and post-execution optimization of said process models. The BPSim specification consists of an underlying computer-interpretable representation (meta-model) and an accompanying electronic file format to ease the safeguard and transfer of this data between different tools (interchange format).

Wf-XML

Wf-XML is designed and implemented as an extension to the

OASIS In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment'ksar''with its surrounding feeding source, the palm grove, within a relational and circulatory nomadic system.” The location of oases has been of critical imp ...

br>Asynchronous Service Access Protocol
(ASAP). ASAP provides a standardized way that a program can start and monitor a program that might take a long time to complete. It provides the capability to monitor the running service, and be informed of changes in its status. Wf-XML extends this by providing additional standard web service operations that allow sending and retrieving the “program” or definition of the service which is provided. A process engine has this behavior of providing a service that lasts a long time, and also being programmable by being able to install process definitions.

Award programs

The Workflow Management Coalition sponsored three annual award programs: # The "Global Awards for Excellence in BPM & Workflow" recognized organizations that had implemented particularly innovative workflow solutions. Every year between 10 and 15 BPM and workflow solutions were recognized in this manner. WfMC published the case studies in the annual Excellence in Practice series. # WfMC inaugurated a Global Awards program in 2011 for

Adaptive Case Management Adaptation, in biology, is the process or trait by which organisms or population better match their environment Adaptation may also refer to: Arts * Adaptation (arts), a transfer of a work of art from one medium to another ** Film adaptation, ...

case studies to recognize and focus upon ACM use cases. Adaptive Case Management, also known as Dynamic or Advanced Case Management, was a new technological approach to supporting knowledge workers in leading edge organizations. These awards were designed to highlight the best examples of technology to support knowledge workers. In 2012 nine teams were awarded top honors at the ACM Live Event and are featured in the book,
How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done
" In 2013, WfMC updated the program to “WfMC Awards for Excellence in Case Management” to recognize the growing deployment of Production Case Management and the winning teams are featured in the book
Empowering Knowledge Workers
" # The Marvin L. Manheim Award For Significant Contributions in the Field of Workflow was given to one person every year in recognition of individual contributions to workflow and BPM standards. This award commemorated

Marvin Manheim The Marvin L. Manheim Award For Significant Contributions in the Field of Workflow is an industry recognition created by the Workflow Management Coalition in honor of the late Marvin L. Manheim. Manheim was a co-founder of the Workflow Management C ...

who played a key motivational role in the founding of the WfMC.

References

External links

Workflow Management Coalition
Website no longer exists
XPDL
Website was dedicated to the WfMC's XPDL specification, no longer exists
BPSim
Website dedicated to the WfMC's BPSim specification Workflow technology Business process modelling