Towards Living Inter-organizational Processes

Abstract

Abstract-Business Process Management (BPM) has gained significant adoption in practice for enabling organizations to increase their effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. This broad adoption has not only been fostered by a rich and wellestablished theory to model, analyze, simulate, and enact business processes, but also by internationally accepted standards and mature technologies. Caused by the ever increasing speed and volatility of markets and the dynamics of new technologies, such as cloud infrastructures and mobile communications, we face a new generation of business processes, which we refer to as living inter-organizational processes. Such processes are not in control of one single organization; instead, they are enacted by multiple organizations, where no participating party possesses full control over the entire process. Such processes often involve a high number of actors that might even be unknown in advance. These actors require various degrees in participation, they are acting in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, such processes are often weakly structured or designed in an ad-hoc manner, and have to be continuously subject to evolution. Unfortunately, existing theories, methodologies, and technologies cannot cope with this challenging combination of aspects, which all have to be considered when dealing with living inter-organizational processes. The state of the art typically addresses singular aspects in isolation. However, a holistic approach to these challenges bears a tremendous potential. This paper aims to contribute towards a holistic approach to living inter-organizational processes. To this end, we describe different perspectives on inter-organizational processes and identify challenges for making them living processes.

BProVe: A formal verification framework for business process models

“…This enables inter-organisational correctness which is still a challenge [25]. Thus, results of checking safeness and soundness with respect to BPMN collaborations differ from results obtained through encodings, which usually introduce a mapping at process level and then compose the processes in a collaboration by means of an inner transition [26].…”

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the art and open challenges for BPM in the cloud

“…A process landscape is made up from a large number of concurrent processes. The process landscape may span different organizations [1]. To allow for such a collaboration, the BPMSs executing process orchestrations communicate with each other by sending and receiving messages [6].…”

“…In contrast, private cloud and virtualization techniques can offer much more finegrained vertical scaling, e.g., by allowing to specify the amount of RAM in small increments. 1 The question then is how to split the available physical hardware into chunks of virtualized resources, and the finer steps of course mean that there are a lot more options to consider.…”

“…Scalability of computational resources for these processes is an important challenge to realize in the next generation of interorganizational processes [1]. In a traditional architecture, resources for human and service tasks within these processes had to be scheduled in advance and were sized so that they were able to allow for processing of tasks even at peak times.…”

Cost-Driven Optimization of Cloud Resource Allocation for Elastic Processes

“…Especially in large companies, the number of different business process models available can become extensive (Breu et al 2013;Jin et al, 2013). Correspondingly, a business process landscape may comprise a very large number of running business process instances, all of which are made up from single tasks (i.e., process steps) with differing computational resource demands.…”