A Framework for E-Services: A Three-Level Approach towards Process and Data Management

Service outsourcing is the business paradigm, in which an organization has part of its business process performed by a service provider. In dynamic markets, service providers can be selected on the fly during process enactment. The cooperation between the parties is specified in a dynamically made electronic contract. This contract includes a process specification that is tailored towards service brokering and cross-organizational process enactment and hence has to conform to market and specification standards. Process enactment, however, relies on intraorganizational process specifications that have to comply with the infrastructure available in an organization for process and data management. In this report, we present a three-level process and data specification framework for dynamic contract-based service outsourcing. This framework relates the two process specification levels through a third, conceptual level. This approach is inspired by the wellknown ANSI-SPARC model for data management. We discuss an abstract architecture for dynamic service outsourcing based on the three-level framework. We show how the framework and architecture can be placed in the context of existing infrastructures for cross-organizational process support. As service outsourcing is used more and more for core business processes requiring reliable execution, we pay special attention to transaction management.