Transitioning Business Processes to a Collaborative Business Environment with Mobility: An Action Research Based on a Service Organization

AbstrACt Web Services (WS) technologies create the potential for an organization to collaborate with partners and customers by enabling its software applications to transact over the Internet. This collaboration is achieved by carefully incorporating Web Services in the organization's software applications, resulting in comprehensive Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the enterprise. This incorporation of WS-enabled applications and components in the organization's overall enterprise architecture requires understanding of the service at three interrelated yet distinct layers: policies, activities, and standards. This chapter describes how the existing business processes of an organization are transitioned in to collaborative business processes that would result in a Collaborative Web-Based System (CWBS). The ideas presented in this chapter have been validated through an action-research carried out by the authors in a large energy supplier organization in Melbourne, Australia.