Effective Nov 1, 2004, the Business Process Management Ontology (BPMO) has been officially renamed to BMO (Business Management Ontology). This adequately reflects the much broader scope and is a logical consequence of an architectural redesign that manifests itself in release 1.0.

With its planned enhancements, the BMO will form a coherent foundation for all aspects of business management. The design of the BMO already reflects an architectural separation of concern, which, for example, manifests itself in the design of the Business Process, Business Rules and Organization Model concepts. Yet, notwithstanding architectural separation, the BMO integrates concepts and will thus provide an integrated view on all business management aspects.

Business rules play an important role in business process definitions, and business rule definition and management should be external from the definitions of the business process they govern. As a consequence, the BMO provides for business rules to reside outside of process definitions. Processes refer to business rules rather than embed them. This architectural separation is important for the evolution and management of business processes, business vocabulary and business rules along separate but mutually supportive paths.

Separating rules from process definitions provides visibility of the rules, so they can be managed. In addition, it also yields simplicity to process models, so they can concentrate on the sequential, temporal, and resource allocation aspects unique to processes and not have to deal with the declarative and policy aspects that are the domain of rules.

Separating the vocabulary definition from the process definition promotes semantic integration of the business. Ultimately, seamless interoperability of organizational units and systems will be the result, based on a shared vocabulary that covers all business aspects.