Linkedin: Are we overdue for a BPMS shakeout? Or is the large number of software vendors offering tools in this area a good thing?

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At present, we have vendor-centric BPM and this is good ... for vendors. At the same time we don’t have a commonly agreed BPM reference model, or a good set of standards (e.g. for exchange diagrams between different tools), etc.

I believe that it is time that BPM progresses from being vendor-centric to become customer-centric. A good example of customer-centricity is the current situation with web browsers – all vendors of web browsers want to benchmark their product against the ACID3 test (acid3.acidtests.org) to demonstrate their compliance with standards. Once such a baseline has been established, it becomes easy to compare the performance of products. I hope that a similar tendency will be established in the BPM field whereby vendors of BPM software will compete in terms of compliance with standards and product performance.

Interesting that the W3C maintain a coherent set of standards for HTML:
a) xHTML for structure and content,
b) CSS for presentation,
c) DOM-based API for dynamic modifications, and
d) some other specialized standards.

Wish that we can have something similar in BPM.

Thanks,
AS