OMG and the EDM Council: Openness Put to the Test

The Object Management Group has long been considered an exception in the world of standardization: an organization in which every member has an equal voice regardless of company size, while other consortia tend to function more like exclusive circles with an invitation-only threshold. As of October 1, 2025, the OMG—founded in 1989—is no longer self-owned. The EDM Council has taken over its assets and has since been operating under the name EDM Association.

The Deal in Detail

On July 1, 2025, they signed EDM Council and OMG an agreement to take over the organization. The deal was finalized on October 1, 2025. The new EDM Association brings together more than 700 companies and public institutions through eight regional offices. OMG includes standards such as UML, SysML, CORBA, and BPMN, as well as the Digital Twin Consortium, AREA (Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance), and CISQ (Consortium for Information and Software Quality). All four will continue to operate as separate communities under the umbrella of the EDM Association.

„By merging our two organizations, we are strengthening the links between data management, standards, and innovation.“

(John Bottega, President of the EDM Association

Bill Hoffman, OMG’s former chairman and CEO, describes the move as a catalyst for the organization’s mission: greater reach, more industries, and direct access to established data governance practices for OMG members. For user organizations that use UML or SysML on a daily basis, little will change for the time being. The standards committees will continue their work under a new umbrella.

Criticism: Concerns About Monopolization

Not every reaction was positive. The industry portal CDOTrends He smugly titled his commentary „Your Data Standards Just Got Monopolized. Let’s Celebrate!“ and cut straight to the heart of the matter:

„If an organization controls everything—from data frameworks to the OMG Digital Twin Consortium—does that create efficiency, or does it stifle the competition that drives standards forward in the first place?“

CDOTrends

The article points out that Chief Data Officers have benefited from competing frameworks so far because competition among standardization bodies drives the pace of progress. A single organization that brings everything under one roof—from data management to digital twins to software quality—carries the risk of bureaucratic delays rather than accelerated standards development.

My Own Experience

I myself had worked with the OMG in the 2010s. At that time, I was an active member of the working group that had brought the Requirements Interchange Format (RIF/ReqIF) to the OMG as a standard. Several automakers had initially launched the standard under the name RIF, which was then refined by a ProSTEP working group for standardization at OMG under the name ReqIF.

Even back then, I noticed how open, generous, and pragmatic the OMG was in its approach. All data and documents are available online and can be accessed without registration. That made my work at the Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework (RMF) We were very relieved because we were able to import the machine-readable ReqIF format directly into the project.

The OMG manages many of the standards that we regularly use in systems engineering: SysML, UML, BPMN, University of Alaska Fairbanks and many more.

OMG was always the open one

CDOTrends’ concern about monopolization hits a nerve when you compare the histories of the two organizations. Since 1989, OMG has developed its standards through a comparatively open process: membership with no major barriers to entry, voting rights regardless of company size, and working groups open to every paying member. That is exactly what I have experienced in my work with OMG. Other standardization bodies in the software and systems engineering field tend to function more like private clubs, with tiered membership levels and committees that are effectively open only to larger manufacturers.

The EDM Council has a different background. As an industry forum for the financial sector focused on data governance and compliance, its membership base has long been more exclusive and tailored to financial institutions. The real question behind the press release is whether the new EDM Association will adopt OMG’s open culture or gradually align the OMG communities with the Council’s more tightly structured model.

It’s natural to hope that a larger, more financially robust organization would actually provide even more room for openness: more resources for working groups, more regional offices, and more avenues for participation. The opposite is equally conceivable. An expanded administrative structure could lead to formalized membership tiers, as are common in the data governance field.

Conclusion

Anyone who uses UML, SysML, or BPMN on a daily basis should keep an eye on the EDM Association’s governance documents in the coming months. What matters is not the press release itself, but whether the SysML and UML Revision Task Forces will retain their open participation structure or whether new membership tiers will be introduced. The next revision of the SysML specification will reveal which direction the new organization is actually taking.