Australian university project eases open source BPM

06.07.2006
Ironing out business process management (BPM) ambiguity with a well-defined, open source workflow language is the goal of the YAWL project, founded by Queensland University of Technology researchers.

YAWL, or Yet Another Workflow Language, will be attractive to IT managers as it provides a BPM solution over which they have full control, according to the project's manager Associate Professor Arthur ter Hofstede.

"For the cost-conscious IT manager, the absence of licensing fees may also be important and the risks typically associated with vendor lock-in can be avoided," said ter Hofstede. "YAWL's service-oriented architecture provides unique flexibility when it comes to enabling interoperability with external systems and extending current functionality."

YAWL aims to provide a support environment to specify, analyze and execute business processes, and to simplify the specification of executable business processes without the distraction of "unnecessary" technical considerations.

"We do not think that a business analyst [BA] needs to know Java," explained ter Hofstede, noting that YAWL provides comprehensive support for the workflow patterns and a repository for workflow modeling patterns.

"Business scenarios can be complex and a modelling language should be able to deal with this complexity," he said. "Business analysts should not need to continuously have to find workarounds to specify complicated aspects of business scenarios, which tend to occur naturally in practice, as this may lead to process models which are hard to understand and maintain."