Modelling and analysis techniques for cross‐organizational workflow systems

TLDR

Emerging e‑business, e‑commerce, and virtual enterprises drive the trend of managing workflows across organizational boundaries, where cross‑organizational workflows combine intra‑organizational processes and inter‑organization interactions, and intra‑organizational modeling techniques are mature while inter‑organizational workflows focus on integrating partners and reconciling relationships. The paper reviews and contrasts intra‑ and inter‑organizational workflow modeling techniques, introduces detailed inter‑organizational approaches, and summarizes techniques while discussing technical and managerial research issues. The authors describe modeling approaches in two functional directions: routing languages that combine individual workflows and interaction patterns that enable collaborative partners to interact. The study summarizes existing techniques and highlights interesting technical and managerial research issues in cross‑organizational workflow modeling. © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract Emerging e‐business, e‐commerce, and virtual enterprises are leading to the trend of managing workflows across organizational boundaries. A cross‐organizational workflow is generally comprised of intra‐organizational workflows and inter‐organization workflows. The modeling techniques for the intra‐organizational workflows are relatively matured. In this paper, they are briefly reviewed and contrasted to show their strong points and weaknesses. The modeling approaches for the inter‐organizational workflows is emphasized and introduced in detail in this paper. The inter‐organizational workflow emphasizes more on combining the workflows of different partners together and reconciling the relationships between them. Thus, the modeling approaches are described in two directions by their functions: routing languages introduced to combine individual workflows and interaction patterns proposed for collaborative partners to interact with each other. In this paper, some techniques are summarized, and some interesting research issues in the area are discussed in both technical and managerial perspectives. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.