Addressing Interoperability Issues in Business Process Management

As part of the INTEROP NoE first phase work, interoperability requirements and existing facilities on the area of Business Process Management were studied. This paper summarizes the contributions and discusses current research trends. Business Process Management is seen as a set of continuous processes in an enterprise related to the strategic decisions, production and delivery workflows, IT support, and evaluation of the appropriateness and performance of the workflows. As enterprises are under increasing pressure to be agile for collaboration, interoperability and external business processes with partners in a joint business network become essential. On this area, a definite requirement for moving from case-bycase IT integration projects to more flexible unification-based or federation-based solutions can be seen. At the same time, interoperability challenges rise from the success of technical message transfer, through semantics preservation needs (information representation formats, information contents ontologies), to conformance to the joint processes and process-awareness. Furthermore, pragmatic aspects related to business values, business rule, and contractual prioritizing complicate the issue. Two complementary development strategies push the area forward: standardization within various consortia, and research on common infrastructure services for process model management, interoperable process management, and interoperable sharing of services.