Richard Soley's On The Road Blog

Introducing OCEB 2: A Revision of OMG’s BPM Certification Program

As I've said many times before, OMG is unique in that we focus on the creation of ecosystems around our standards, rather than on the standards themselves. Part of that ecosystem has included certifying professionals in the use of our standards as part of their methodologies and tools.

Holders of OMG certifications gain industry recognition for their knowledge and skills, as well as their demonstrated commitment to their profession. Certification opens the door to job advancement and promotion and can also present new career opportunities. To employers, certified experts stand out in the large pool of potential job candidates, and create a heightened level of expectation of those professionals.

Currently, OMG offers four certification programs. They are:

• The OMG Certified UML Professional (OCUP)
• The OMG Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB)
• The OMG Certified Systems Modeling Professional (OCSMP)
• The OMG Certified Real-time & Embedded Specialist (OCRES)

Last Tuesday, OMG announced that the OCEB certification program is being updated to OCEB 2, reflecting enhancements made to the Business Process Model and Notation (now BPMN2) specification as it moved to its Version 2.0 major release.

In all, the OCEB 2 Program will update the Fundamental, Business Intermediate, and Technical Intermediate OCEB examinations. As part of the Tuesday announcement, OMG revealed that the OCEB 2 Fundamental examination had just published and is now available for registration and testing, while the OCEB 2 Business Intermediate and Technical Intermediate exams will follow in early 2014, a few months apart. These exams will cover new and revised features of BPMN 2 which include a  richer palette of event types, more capable depiction and use of data in process models, representation of business interactions in Collaborations and Choreographies, as well as other features that will facilitate and enhance the modeling of business processes.

We encourage everyone holding the original OCEB certification to recertify with the OCEB 2 program. Only OCEB 2 certified experts have the distinction of holding documented credentials for BPMN 2.0 and its use in both business and technology solutions. To encourage these certified practitioners to upgrade, OMG is offering vouchers giving a discount on their OCEB 2 Fundamental examination. Granted on a sliding scale, the discount starts at 10% but reaches 100% for those who took the original OCEB Fundamental exam most recently.

OCEB and OCEB 2 exams -- and all other OMG certification exams -- are offered worldwide in English at Pearson VUE testing centers. OCEB 2's testing fee is $200 USD in native English-speaking countries and $210 USD in countries where English is not the native language and where testing time is extended by 30 minutes. OCEB 2 certification at each level is valid for five years. Learn more about OCEB 2 at www.omg.org/oceb-2 and visit www.omg.org/omg-certifications to learn about all of OMG's certification programs.

Take the opportunity to Show What You Know!

OMG Encouraged by House of Representatives Passage of DATA Act

Yesterday the United States House of Representatives passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act -- a/k/a the DATA Act -- which is designed to enforce better transparency, more effective federal management, and cheaper compliance in the U.S. federal government. When the DATA Act is passed and adopted, US citizens will be able to see how and where their tax dollars are being spent.

The legislation in the House has bipartisan support and will go a long way towards making the federal government's spending open and transparent. In addition, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee has referred an amended version of the House bill out-of-committee, thus setting it up for a vote by the full Senate at some point in the future.

As a member of the Data Transparency Coalition -- the trade association that advocates for data reform in the US government -- OMG fully supports the DATA Act and believes that standardizing data will vastly improve the transparency and accountability of the US government. With the successful passage of the DATA Act here in the US and similar legislation in several European and Asian countries, we believe an age of greater data standardization and transparency will be under way.

Now the Act wends its way through Congress; we encourage all members of the US House of Representatives, Senate and President Obama to swiftly pass a final DATA Act. OMG stands ready -- alongside other standards organizations -- to develop the standards that will help make the US federal government more transparent.

Click here to learn more about the work on semantic data standards that the OMG Financial Services Domain Task Force is currently working on. In addition to the standardization efforts led by our members, I personally have joined forces with David Saul, Senior Vice President of State Street Bank; Said Tabet, CTO, Governance, Risk and Compliance Strategy, EMC; David Blaszkowsky, until recently a US Federal financial regulator; and Lars Toomre, Managing Director of Toomre Capital Markets, in an informal group we call the Financial Semantics Collaborative, spreading the message of data collaboration and quality, governance and standards.