CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management for Service Outsourcing in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

CrossFlow is an ESPRIT/IST project for support of cross-organizational workflow management in dynamically established virtual enterprises. The business paradigm of CrossFlow is that of dynamic service outsourcing, in which one organization (service consumer) outsources part of its business process to another organization (service provider). Service consumer and provider find each other through electronic market places and specify their collaboration in an electronic contract. This contract is then used to dynamically configure an infrastructure that connects and controls the workflow management systems of both organizations to facilitate provision of the service. The infrastructure supports fine-grained monitoring and control to allow tight cooperation between the organizations. 1 The CrossFlow context Today, companies focus on their core business and outsource secondary activities to other organizations. Growing complexity of products requires co-makership relations between organizations. Value chains require a tight cooperation between companies participating in these chains. To enable the creation and operation of these virtual organizations, the information processing infrastructures of participating organizations need to be linked. Automated support for processes crossing organizational boundaries is an essential element. The advent of business-to-business electronic commerce adds a dynamic dimension to this: virtual enterprises are formed and dismantled dynamically in rapidly evolving markets. Consequently, their process support infrastructure must also be dynamic. Two key elements need to be integrated: trading systems that allow business partners to find each other dynamically and workflow management systems that control the processes in and across the organizations. Electronic trading systems have become commonplace in the large-scale advent of electronic commerce. Mostly, the trading systems focus on trading objects, i.e., physical objects like books, oil or wheat, or immaterial objects like seats in an airplane. To support the dynamic creation of tightly linked virtual enterprises, however, it is business processes or business services that are traded. This requires a detailed way to specify services in terms of abstract process structures, process parameters, quality of Copyright 2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering