A Methodical Interoperability Framework for Collaborative Business Process Management in the Public Sector

Nowadays, economic as well as public organizations are changing towards networked structures. An increasing level of cooperation between public administrations on national, regional and local levels requires methods to develop interoperable E-Government systems and leads to the necessity of an efficient modeling of collaborative business processes and their subsequent implementation. This is a complex task, since it includes modeling of processes from various perspectives modeling of internal and collaborative processes and on various technical levels to enable both conceptual modeling and the execution of processes that comply with the conceptual models. In this paper a methodical interoperability framework is described for the management of collaborative business processes in the public sector. Building on this, it is described how business process models can stepwise be transformed to technical process models in the form of Web Service protocols for implementing the collaborative processes. The methodology is motivated and explained on the basis of an EGovernment reference model for the German Plan Approval Procedure. After a motivation for the need of interoperability frameworks, section 2 describes the R4eGov methodical interoperability framework. Based on this, the paper presents in section 3 a method that allows the creation of collaborative business processes on a conceptual level. Here, the requirements and single steps of the collaborative modeling method are illustrated on the on the E-Government case study. In section 4 we change from design time to run time and describe how to implement the modeling approach presented before with Web Service protocols. Finally, we draw a conclusion and give an outlook on future research in section 5.