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

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

A Data Flow Perspective for Business Process Integration

Business process integration has become prevalent as business is increasingly crossing organizational boundaries. While workflow technology is a standard solution for business process management, it is imperative for workflow management systems to provide effective and efficient support for collaboration. To address the issue of protecting organizations’ competitive knowledge and private information while also enabling business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, past research has focused on customized public and private process design and structure correctness of the integrated workflow. However, data flow is important for business process integration because data is always sensitive when conducting inter-organizational business and data errors could still happen even given syntactically correct activity dependence. This paper presents a data flow perspective. It gives an approach to define a “public data set” for each involved organization exemplifying the integrated workflow that is needed in order to be free from data anomalies e.g., missing data and redundant data errors

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

Geschäftsprozessmanagement in global verteilten Produktentwicklungsprojekten

Die schnelle Reaktion auf Veränderungen von Märkten, Kunden und Technologien erfordert insbesondere in der Produktentwicklung eine hohe Flexibilität, weshalb Unternehmen von klassischen zu agilen bzw. hybriden Vorgehensmodellen wechseln und Lean Methoden einsetzen. Darüber hinaus wird die Produktentwicklung vermehrt kooperativ in global verteilten Teams durchgeführt. In diesem Zusammenhang stellt die übergeordnete Steuerung der Projekte zwischen den global verteilten Teams mit unterschiedlichen Vorgehensmodellen eine Herausforderung für das Projektmanagement dar. Derzeit gibt es keine ganzheitliche Methode für die flexible Vernetzung von Geschäftsprozessen in global verteilten Produktentwicklungsprojekten. Die flexible Vernetzung kooperierender Unternehmen mit unterschiedlichen Vorgehensmodellen und die damit verbundene, schnelle Initiierung der Kooperation, die Beibehaltung von Freiheitsgraden beteiligter Unternehmen und die automatisierte Ermittlung von Prozess-/ Projektkennzahlen, stellt eine Herausforderung für das Projektmanagement dar. Dieser Beitrag illustriert die Problematik und stellt einen Ansatz für eine flexible Vernetzung von Geschäftsprozessen vor