Value-Driven Coordination Process Design Using Physical Delivery Models

Current e-business technology enables the execution of increasingly complex coordination processes that link IT services of different companies. Successful design of cross-organizational coordination processes requires the mutual alignment of the coordination process with a commercial business case. There is however a large conceptual gap between a commercial business case and a coordination process. The business case is stated in terms of commercial transactions, but the coordination process consists of sequences, choices and iterations of actions of people and machines that are absent from a business case model; also, the cardinality of the connections and the frequency and duration of activities are different in both models. This paper proposes a coordination process design method that focusses on the the shared physical world underlying the business case and coordination process. In this physical world, physical deliveries take place that realize commercial transactions and that must be coordinated by a coordination process. Physical delivery models allow us to identify the relevant cardinality, frequency and duration properties so that we can design the coordination process to respect these properties. In the case studies we have done so far, a physical delivery model is the greatest common denominator that we needed to verify consistency between a business case and a coordination process model.