Interesting press release, Consortium of Industry-Leading BPM Companies Establishes Common Interface Format (CIF) for Round-Trip Integration Between BPA and BPM.
Recognizing the distinction between models for documentation and models for execution was outlined in Notes on BPM.
Per Gartner:
With CIF, Proforma and the consortium members are the first providers to enable end-to-end support of BPA and BPM. "For those organizations that want a 'best of breed' approach, it is imperative to have a common interchange between business modeling tools (BPA) and business execution tools (BPM) that enables round trip incremental improvement behavior," said Jim Sinur, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner, Inc.
Of course this can be seen as Proforma trying to remain relevant in the face of BPM vendors slowly becoming more mature. Regardless, it is a good thing and hopefully will allow BPM vendors to focus on tooling their execution engines, offering more natural support for XML and other emerging standards.
And CIF as defined by the consortium:
A point-to-point solution, CIF complements extensible standards such as BPEL or XPDL. CIF can stand alone or be embedded into a standard. By embedding CIF, the standard can carry execution semantics, as well as the business semantics and traceability provided by CIF. For example, users will be able to embed a CIF stream within the BPEL standard. This value add will allow organizations to execute processes and tie the executable process definitions back to comprehensive business process requirements.
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