Virtual enterprise co-ordinator - Agreement-driven gateways for cross-organisational workflow management

Abstract

Today's Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) do not distinguish between an external view of a process that is visible outside the organisation and its internal details. Their interfaces are generally aimed at the internal user. This is a problem if one organisation (provider) wants to perform a process on behalf of another (requester) so that it can be initiated and accessed by the requester through an automated interface and, vice versa, that the results can be reported back. This issue gains importance as WfMS are in widespread use today and the trend to outsource non-core business leads to increased service activity between companies. Organisations do not want to make internal information generally available to business partners nor do they wish to restrict their ability to conduct business internally. If organisations enter a business relationship, they define in an agreement the circumstances in which the requester might initiate a process in the provider and exchange further information during the process's performance. This paper describes the Virtual Enterprise Co-ordinator (VEC), a concept for the setup and management of gateways to WfMS-enacted processes for outside organisations on the basis of simple agreements. Using VEC, organisations can provide external partners with a controlled way of accessing WfMS-enacted processes, while retaining the freedom to change the internal details of those processes.