Workflow Management in Electronic Commerce

In electronic commerce scenarios, effectiveness and efficiency of business process execution are of paramount importance for business success. Even more than in traditional commerce scenarios, they determine the chances of survival of organizations in fast moving, highly competitive electronic markets. To obtain the required levels of effectiveness and efficiency, well-structured automated business process support is required. For typical business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic commerce, process support is usually of an intra-organizational nature. For businessto-business (B2B) electronic commerce, however, process support across organizational boundaries is often required as the basis for virtual enterprises. This tutorial addresses the application of workflow management (WFM) for process support in both these cases. The tutorial is organized into three parts. In the first part, we pay attention to ‘classical’ workflow management in the context of a single organization. In the second part, we extend this to workflow management across the boundaries of organizations. In the third part, we further extend this model by making service processes – implemented as workflows – the objects traded in ecommerce scenarios. We outline each part in the sections below.