Survey on Information Monitoring and Control in Cross-enterprise Collaborative Business Processes

The difference between Collaborative Business Processes (CBP) and ordinary sequential business processes (BP) is in the necessity for decentralized coordination, flexible backward recovery, participants notification about the current state, fast adaptability to changes in participants’ work, multiple information systems, individual authorization settings of the participants, etc. The paper presents a literature survey of four CBP paradigms (namely oriented on activity flows, documents, cases, and business artifacts) conducted from the perspective of a vendor of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Restrictions of the case are implicit information flows in BPs, diversity of ERP integrations with customers’ information systems (IS), a lack of mechanisms for BP monitoring, backward recovery and for user notification about the current state and tasks as well as inability to make changes in customers’ ISs. The paradigms are reviewed and analyzed regarding these restrictions.