Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) Ratified as OASIS Standard

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) Ratified as OASIS Standard

Boston, MA, USA; 3 May 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. 



Additional Information:

OASIS BCM Technical Committee
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/bcm/

Cover Pages Technology Report: Business-Centric Methodology 
http://xml.coverpages.org/bcm.html



About OASIS:
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the
development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members
themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using an open process
expressly designed to promote consensus and unite disparate efforts. The
consortium produces open standards for Web services, security,
e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for
application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000
participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members
in 100 countries. Approved OASIS Standards include AVDL, BCM, CAP, DITA,
DocBook, DSML, ebXML CPPA, ebXML Messaging, ebXML Registry, EML,
OpenDocument, SAML, SPML, UBL, UDDI, WSDM, WS-Reliability, WSRF, WSRP,
WS-Security, XACML, XCBF, and XML Catalogs. http://www.oasis-open.org

Press contact:
Carol Geyer
Director of Communications, OASIS
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209