Coordination of Local Process Views in Interorganizational Business Process

Collaborative business has been increasingly developing with the environment of globalization and advanced information technologies. In a collaboration environment with multiple organizations, participants from different organizations always have different views about modeling the overall business process due to different knowledge and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, flexible support, privacy preservation and process reuse are important issues that should be considered in business process management across organizational boundaries. This paper presents a novel approach of modeling interorganizational business process for collaboration. Our approach allows for modeling loosely coupled interorganizational business process considering different views of organizations. In the proposed model, organizations have their own local process views of modeling business process instead of sharing pre-defined global processes. During process cooperation, local process of an organization can be invisible to other organizations. Further, we propose the coordination mechanisms for different local process views to detect incompatibilities among organizations. We illustrate our proposed approach by a case study of interorganizational software development collaboration. key words: interorganizational business process, workflow, process view, coordination, compatibility analysis