Cross-organizational processes in Public Administrations: Conceptual modeling and implementation with Web Service Protocols

An increasing level of cooperation between public administrations on regional and national levels requires methods to develop interoperable E-Government systems. It leads to the necessity of an efficient modeling of cross-organizational business processes and their subsequent implementation. This is a complex task, since it includes modeling of processes from various perspectives modeling of internal and cross-organizational processes and on various technical levels to enable both conceptual modeling and the execution of processes that comply with the conceptual models. In this paper a methodology is described for creating models of cross-organizational business processes based on Event-driven Process Chains (EPC). Building on this, it is described how these conceptual models can stepwise be transformed to technical process models in the form of Web Service protocols for implementing the cross-organizational processes. The methodology is motivated and explained on the basis of an E-Government reference model for the German Plan Approval Procedure.