CrossFlow: Integrating Workflow Management and Electronic Commerce

The CrossFlow1 architecture provides support for cross-organisational workflow management in dynamically established virtual enterprises. The creation of a business relationship between a service provider organisation performing a service on behalf of a consumer organisation can be made dynamic when augmented by virtual market technology, the dynamic configuration of the contract enactment infrastructures, and the provision of fine grained service monitoring and control. Standard ways of describing services and contracts can be combined with matchmaking technology to create a virtual market for such service provision and consumption. A provider can then advertise its services in the market and consumers can search for a compatible business partner. This provides choice in selecting a partner and allows the deferment of the decision to a point in time where it can be made on the most up-to-date requirements of the consumer and service offers in the market. The penalty for deferred decision making is the time to set up the infrastructure in each organisation for the dynamically established contract. Thus, a further aspect of CrossFlow was to exploit the contract in the dynamic and automatic configuration of the contract enactment and supervision infrastructures of the respective organisations and in linking them in a dynamic fashion. The electronic contract, which results from the agreement between the newly established business partners, completely specifies the intended collaboration between them. Given the importance of the business process enacted by the provider, this includes fine-grained monitoring and control to allow tight co-operation between the organisations

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management for Service Outsourcing in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

In this report, we present the approach to cross-organizational workflow management of the CrossFlow project. CrossFlow is a European research project aiming at the support of cross-organizational workflows in dynamic virtual enterprises. The cooperation in these virtual enterprises is based on dynamic service outsourcing specified in electronic contracts. Service enactment is performed by dynamically linking the workflow management infrastructures of the involved organizations. Extended service enactment support is provided in the form of cross-organizational transaction management and process control, advanced quality of service monitoring, and support for high-level flexibility in service enactment. CrossFlow technology is realized on top of a commercial workflow management platform and applied in two real-world scenarios in the contexts of a logistics and an insurance company

The business process modelling ontology

In this paper we describe the Business Process Modelling Ontology (BPMO), which is part of an approach to modelling business processes at the semantic level, integrating knowledge about the organisational context, workflow activities and Semantic Web Services. We harness knowledge representation and reasoning techniques so that business process workflows can: be exposed and shared through semantic descriptions; refer to semantically annotated data and services; incorporate heterogeneous data though semantic mappings; and be queried using a reasoner or inference engine. In this paper we describe our approach and evaluate BPMO through a use case

Team to Market (T2M): Creating High Performance Teams in the Digital Age

1. Teams are the essential means of product or service delivery and the fundamental building blocks of modern organisations. An effective team can produce results far outperforming a collection of even the most talented individuals when team members coalesce and jell into a single, well-functioning, fully-aligned organism. This report advances the notion of “Team to Market” (T2M) to help business leaders and knowledge workers understand, create and lead high performance teams in the digital age

Towards Grid Interoperability

The Grid paradigm promises to provide global access to computing resources, data storage and experimental instruments. It also provides an elegant solution to many resource administration and provisioning problems while offering a platform for collaboration and resource sharing. Although substantial progress has been made towards these goals, nevertheless there is still a lot of work to be done until the Grid can deliver its promises. One of the central issues is the development of standards and Grid interoperability. Job execution is one of the key capabilities in all Grid environments. This is a well understood, mature area with standards and implementations. This paper describes some proof of concept experiments demonstrating the interoperability between various Grid environments

MOSAIC roadmap for mobile collaborative work related to health and wellbeing.

The objective of the MOSAIC project is to accelerate innovation in Mobile Worker Support Environments. For that purpose MOSAIC develops visions and illustrative scenarios for future collaborative workspaces involving mobile and location-aware working. Analysis of the scenarios is input to the process of road mapping with the purpose of developing strategies for R&D leading to deployment of innovative mobile work technologies and applications across different domains. One of the application domains where MOSAIC is active is health and wellbeing. This paper builds on another paper submitted to this same conference, which presents and discusses health care and wellbeing specific scenarios. The aim is to present an early form of a roadmap for validation