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business process


A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal. Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving those processes. The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), a non-profit organization, exists to promote the standardizationof common business processes, as a means of furthering e-business and business-to-business (B2B) development. To this end, the organization has developed the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based metalanguage for modeling business processes.

business process Management

Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving anorganization's business processes. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient, and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. BPM is a subset of infrastructure management, the administrative area of concern dealing with maintenance and optimization of an organization's equipment and core operations.
A business process is a set of coordinatedtasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal. The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), a non-profit organization, exists to promote the standardization of common business processes, as a means of furthering e-business and business-to-business (B2B) development. To this end, the organization has developed theBusiness Process Modeling Language (BPML), an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based metalanguage for modeling business processes.

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. For example, computer makers might agree on a standard or common way to describe theinformation about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML. Such a standard way of describing data would enable a user to send an intelligent agent (a program) to each computer maker's Web site, gather data, and then make a valid comparison. XML can be used by any individual or group of individuals or companies that wantsto share information in a consistent way.
XML, a formal recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is similar to the language of today's Web pages, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Both XML and HTML contain markup symbols to describe the contents of a page or file. HTML, however, describes the content of a Web page (mainly text and graphic images) only in terms of how it is tobe displayed and interacted with. For example, the letter "p" placed within markup tags starts a new paragraph. XML describes the content in terms of what data is being described. For example, the word "phonenum" placed within markup tags could indicate that the data that followed was a phone number. This means that an XML file can be processed purely as data by a program or it can be stored withsimilar data on another computer or, like an HTML file, that it can be displayed. For example, depending on how the application in the receiving computer wanted to handle the phone number, it could be stored, displayed, or dialed.

XML is "extensible" because, unlike HTML, the markup symbols are unlimited and self-defining. XML is actually a simpler and easier-to-use subset of the StandardGeneralized Markup Language (SGML), the standard for how to create a document structure. It is expected that HTML and XML will be used together in many Web applications. XML markup, for example, may appear within an HTML page.

Early applications of XML include Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), which describes a channel, a portion of a Web site that has been downloaded to your hard...