E-Collaboration Architecture for Customer-Driven Business Processes in Inter-Organizational Scenarios

Heterogeneous customer requirements in combination with technological improvements enable new or improved customer-driven business processes. The management of such processes requires a deep but flexible integration of enterprises. In this context new forms of cooperation like E-Collaboration, describing the efficient and effective collaboration of participants in a valueadded network, arise. In order to manage customer-driven business processes across such networks, existing concepts for business process management need to be adapted and extended. In this paper an E-Collaboration architecture is presented, that shows how cross-enterprise, customer-driven processes can be planned, implemented and controlled. The architecture is based on the differentiation of global and local knowledge in the widely used Architecture for Integrated Information Systems (ARIS), developed at the IWi. Another important building block is the life-cycle-model that serves as a guideline for the process-oriented creation and operation of collaborations towards a common customer-driven production and bundling of goods and services.