P2S: A Methodology to Enable Inter-organizational Process Design through Web Services

With the advent of Service Oriented Architecture organizations have experienced services as a platform-independent technology to develop and use simple internal applications or outsource activities by searching for external services, thus enabling inter-organizational interactions. In this scenario, services are units of work provided by service providers and offered to the other organizations involved in a collaborative business process. Collaboration should be facilitated by guaranteeing a homogeneous description of services at the right level of granularity. We propose a methodology to support the designer of a business process in the identification of services that compose the process itself. The methodology should allow collaborative partners to standardize process modelling through component services, enabling effective inter-organizational service discovery. The methodology is presented by means of a running example in a real case scenario.