Virtual Organizations (VO)-a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities-have become popular in today's technology driven business environment business climate. Although many solutions have been proposed over past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by the traditional solutions such as ebXML and EDI. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peerto-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere products. We demonstrate that the proposed SOA-based virtual organization facilitates flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution.

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Management of Virtual Organizations faces unique challenges which traditional approaches cannot address. Based on service oriented architecture, this paper proposes a performance measurement framework that aligns the work of partners in a virtual organization at three different layers. The first layer is designed for partners' strategic alignment through coordination of the value creation network. In the second layer, five performance dimensions of partners' collaboration are defined which can be mapped onto the service choreography model. The third layer focuses on assessing effectiveness and efficiency of partners' domain specific services which is designed based on ITIL V3 service level management guidelines. In order to consolidate the proposed framework, these three layers are integrated using a procedure for extracting service choreography and SLA aggregation patterns from the value network. We propose an integrated solution for decentralized performance measurement without the need for a central authority. The proposed framework provides flexibility, scalability, and interoperability and enhances transparency of partners' performance information at an agreed-upon level as a basis for mutual trust.