4/4/2007 -- The Object Management Group (OMG) and UML Technology Institute (UTI) plan to expand their joint certification programs for business analysts, architects and software designers who follow business process management (BPM) standards in automating processes in an enterprise.

The two nonprofit organizations will enlist expert help to create a new exam series called the OMG Certified Expert in BPM. It will be available in English and Japanese and consist of five exams:

• Fundamental exam (to be taken by all candidates)
• Business group intermediate-level
• Business group advanced-level
• Technical group intermediate-level
• Technical group advanced-level

The aim of business group efforts is to model business processes and improve an enterprise's performance as part of a software-oriented architecture approach. The technical group aims to model business processes with the ideal of automating them.

The new exam series extends the scope of the program from two existing exams that were jointly produced by the OMG and UML. Those two exams -- OMG Certified UML Professional and OMG Certified Real-Time and Embedded Specialist -- are currently available. Information about them is available here.

The UTI is an organization that works to promote the use of open, standards-based modeling technologies through certification programs. The OMG is a computer industry consortium that develops integration standards for a broad range of industries. OMG's Unified Modeling Language standard enables visual design of software and other processes. OMG's middleware standards are based on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). -Kurt Mackie