Dividing Multi-Organizational Businesses into Processes: Capturing Value Creation in Assignment Structures

Business transactions of today often rely on the involvement of several organizations in its preparation and realization. This means that value creation is distributed among several actors and needs to be coordinated. The division of multi-organizational businesses into business processes need to reflect the co-production of value arranged in distributed value production structures. There relies however an unresolved quest of which criteria that should govern such division of business processes. In this paper, business processes for conceiving multiorganizational businesses are identified founded in how customer assignments embed and integrate other assignments through value chains in value networks. Five core process types are identified founded in this assignment structure; development processes, planning processes, provision processes, order fulfilment processes, and evaluation processes. These processes are of both condition creating and realization characteristics to enable an efficient co-ordination of the multi-organizational business.