Working Paper DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION

Attempts to develop open process standards, such as Rosetta Net, have had limited success in finding wide-spread adoption. Standardization of interorganizational business processes, previously viewed as aiding interorganizational collaboration, is shown to impede that collaboration in service contexts. We show that the modeling methods used to standardize inter-organizational processes fails to account for the impact such standardization has on managerial flexibility. Service production involves co-production between consumer and producer, giving rise to greater uncertainty in the sequence of production. Because of this uncertainty managerial flexibility is highly valuable in services. This will show that this uncertainty gives rise to an explosion in the amount of production sequences making coordination between organizations very difficult using process modeling paradigms imbedded in recent attempts at standardization. It will be shown a different approach to modeling processes is needed in a service context.