Semi-automated BP integration in virtual organizations

Abstract

Organizations frequently form various types of partnerships, of which one form is the virtual organization (VO). In VOs, members share part of their capabilities and capacities to seize bigger market opportunities. For effective collaboration however, also sharing knowledge and details about their business processes (BPs) and services is required. If achieved, VO can act as a large and more capable organization, with a repository/pool of services. But to mimic large organizations, VOs need to both drop less optimized overlapping services from this repository and integrate similar services. Our stepwise semi-automated methodology facilitates creating a most optimized pool of BPs with clean and valid integrated processes/services for the VO. A chain of software tools is also introduced in the methodology next to some partially manual steps. The presented solution is applied and evaluated in a real construction industry.