05/03/2006

The OASIS international standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. BCM is a set of layered methods for acquiring interoperable e-business information within communities of interest. The BCM OASIS Standard serves as a road map, enabling organizations to identify and exploit business success factors in a technology-neutral manner, based on open standards.

BCM offers a comprehensive approach for reducing unnecessary risk by providing techniques that result in an information architecture for enterprise agility and interoperability. The new OASIS Standard addresses interoperability through the semantic alignment of concepts and layering of constraints, as defined by reusable business templates.

"BCM gives business people the choice to think in business terms--not in 'techno-babble'," said Peter Fingar, industry expert on business process management and author of the newly released book, Extreme Competition. "BCM helps managers precisely communicate their business goals among heterogeneous partners as well as layering the appropriate steps that must be applied for a project to succeed. By increasing communication between business partners and their developers, the standard lets enterprises achieve a greater degree of agility than would otherwise be possible."

According to Mike Lubash of the United States Department of Defense (DoD), BCM enables enterprises to align their existing services and systems within common lines of business across the value chain. "Instead of depending on narrowly focused, vendor-specific products, BCM users can deploy implementations that expand over time and derive maximum benefit from other standards supported within their enterprise," said Lubash. He co-chairs the OASIS BCM Technical Committee, along with Carl Mattocks of MetLife.

Mattocks added, "BCM builds from a unique viewpoint, one that considers the volatility of an organization's information rather than its interconnection protocols. This is key to enabling organizations to adapt and properly respond to customer requirements."

BCM complements Enterprise Architectures (EA), service-oriented architectures (SOA), and frameworks, such as the Federal Architecture Reference Models and the United States DoD Architecture Framework. BCM also maximizes the use of Web services, providing for the interpretation of messages and business documents from an enterprise viewpoint.

"In essence, BCM allows Web services to scale more efficiently to larger enterprises. In doing so, BCM complements other OASIS Standards, such as SAML, UBL, WS-Reliability, ebXML Messaging, ebXML Registry, UDDI, and XACML," explained Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "We congratulate the members of the OASIS BCM Technical Committee for their efforts."

BCM continues to be advanced within OASIS. The Committee, which remains open to new participation, plans to begin work on a business-centric framing language that will use 'service bridges' to ensure information used by one layer of SOA is accurately communicated to the other BCM layers. OASIS members also intend to develop an ontology for eBusiness that resides in the concept layer to ensure semantic synchronicity across all BCM layers.

All interested parties are encouraged to exchange information on implementing BCM via the bcm-dev mailing list (http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/). As with all Consortium projects, archives of the OASIS BCM Technical Committee's work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment on the standard.