The Challenges of Inter-Organizational Business Process Design - A Research Agenda

Given the increasing importance of value chain collaboration, business processes need to be more closely aligned across organizational boundaries. Hence, business process modeling and design have to be enhanced and extended to cope with inter-organizational business relationships. Among the challenges that arise are interdependencies between internal and external processes, different process logic and terminology, missing clarification of responsibilities and confidentiality issues. This paper analyzes existing approaches to business process modeling, workflow management and B2B standardization with regard to the specific requirements concerning inter-organizational business process design. It extracts the relevant concepts addressing these requirements and draws up an agenda for further research

Adaptive Inter-Organizational Workflow Management for E-Business Integration

As the collaboration between companies is facilitated in e-business environment, inter-organizational workflow management becomes an important issue. Because the inter-organizational workflow consists of autonomous organizational workflow, the coordination of these autonomous processes is required. In this paper, a local viewed inter-organizational workflow model is proposed, in which an inter-organizational workflow is defined as a set of block activities. Exception handling rules for internal process are defined with pertinent block activities. Based on the suggested model, a multi-agent system and a coordination algorithm are proposed. For the illustration of the suggested model, an example interorganizational workflow about book order process is presented

Semantic Information Assurance for Secure Distributed Knowledge Management: A Business Process Perspective

Secure knowledge management for eBusiness processes that span multiple organizations requires intraorganizational and interorganizational perspectives on security and access control issues. There is paucity in research on information assurance of distributed interorganizational eBusiness processes from a business process perspective. This paper presents a framework for secure semantic eBusiness processes integrating three streams of research, namely: 1) eBusiness processes; 2) information assurance; and 3) semantic technology. This paper presents the conceptualization and analysis of a secure semantic eBusiness process framework and architecture, and provides a holistic view of a secure interorganizational semantic eBusiness process. This paper fills a gap in the existing literature by extending role-based access control models for eBusiness processes that are done by using ontological analysis and semantic Web technologies to develop a framework for computationally feasible secure eBusiness process knowledge representations. An integrated secure eBusiness process approach is needed to provide a unifying conceptual framework to understand the issues surrounding access control over distributed information and knowledge resources

Developing Web Services Using Workflow Model: An Inter-organizational Perspective

This paper discusses how a workflow model can be used in the design and development of web services composition. We particularly investigate the development of web services composition in an inter-organizational workflow environment. We discuss respectively how to design an inter-organizational workflow from scratch when there is no existing internal workflow, and how to make existing internal workflows work together in an inter-organizational workflow environment

Inheritance of interorganizational workflows : how to agree to disagree without loosing control?

Intemet-based technology, E-commerce, and the rise of networked virtual enterprises have fueled the need for interorganizational workflows. Although XML allows trading partners to exchange information, it cannot be used to coordinate activities in different organizational entities. Business-to-business processes are hindered by the lack of a common language to support collaboration. This paper describes the P2P (Public-To-Private) approach which addresses some of the problems using a notion of inheritance. The approach consists of three steps: (1) create a common understanding of the interorganizational workfiow by specifying the shared public workflow, (2) partition the public workflow over the organizational entities involved, and (3) for each organizational entity: create a private workflow which is a subclass of the relevant part of the public workfiow. This paper shows that this approach avoids typical anomalies in business-to-business collaboration (e.g., deadlocks and livelocks) and yields an interorganizational workfiow which is guaranteed to realize the behavior specified in the public workflow