One of the many goings on at this week’s HR-XML technical meeting in Atlanta, was a “birds of a feather” on business process modeling and employee on-boarding. Of course, we know from past explorations of the topic, that BPM tools are great fit for employee on-boarding, background checks, and similar HR processes which mix calls to internal and external web services and require handling of relatively complex dependencies and logical branching. Microsoft’s John Evdemon, delivered a nice WS-BPEL overview at our Nashville meeting. That was followed by a presentation by Oracle’s David Shaffer on applications of BPM within the HR domain.

Next week, I’m headed to DC to visit with OMG’s SOA SIG. Among the topics, we’ll explore is modeling HR processes using OMG’s Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN seems to where the market is going in terms of business process modeling. It also can be used in conjunction with related BPM standards, such as BPEL. The idea is not for HR-XML to impose business process, but to provide some fairly granular “starter-kit” process definitions to streamline HR integrations.

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