Towards the Cross-organizational Work Process Coordination and Enactment

The enormous growth of the Interact and the World-Wide Web led to the emergence of various forms of cooperation beyond organizational boundaries. Also, the growth of the solutions business market encouraged enterprises to develop customer-centric services, which require rapid and dynamic service process coordination for on-demand services providing. Through the observation of these tendencies, we can foresee the increase of costs to coordinate business processes beyond organizational boundaries. This paper presents a work process representation model and computation architecture for cross-organizational work process coordination. The model realizes asynchronous work process coordination in the distributed network environment. Also, this model provides decentralized architecture for flexible work process enactment. Additionally, we implemented a prototype system called "ProcessNavigator" that is based on the above model, and we found that this model realizes the work process coordination which will allow users to register their activity without requiring explicit attention to maintaining consistencies with other activities.