Amoeba: A Methodology for Modeling and Evolution of Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Business service engagements involve processes that extend across two or more autonomous organizations. Because of regulatory and competitive reasons, requirements for cross-organizational business processes often evolve in subtle ways. The changes may concern the business transactions supported by a process, the organizational structure of parties participating in the process, or the contextual policies that apply to the process. Current business process modeling approaches handle such changes in an ad hoc manner, and lack a principled means of determining what needs to be changed and where. Cross-organizational settings exacerbate the shortcomings of traditional approaches because changes in one organization can affect the workings of another. This paper describes Amoeba, a methodology for business processes that is based on business protocols. Protocols capture the business meaning of interactions among autonomous parties via commitments. Amoeba includes guidelines for (1) specifying cross-organizational processes using business protocols, and (2) handling evolution of requirements via a novel application of protocol composition. This paper evaluates Amoeba using enhancements of a real-life business scenario of auto-insurance claim processing.