Process-oriented architectures for electronic commerce and interorganizational workflow

The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary Electronic commerce (E-commerce). Although the emphasis has moved from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to the Internet, the focus is still on the technology required to exchange information rather than supporting business processes crossing organizational borders. E-commerce is not just about facilitating individual business transactions, it also comprises the management of the causal relations between these transactions. This paper stresses the process aspect of E-commerce by relating it to workflow management. Traditional workflow management systems assume one centralized enactment service and have problems dealing with dynamic changes and local variations. Since E-commerce is characterized by interorganizational workflows distributed over autonomous business units, these systems tend to be useless in the context of E-commerce. This paper reviews new and existing architectures to enable interorganizational workflow. The presentation focuses on two approaches to partition an interorganizational workflow over multiple business partners. Both approaches are evaluated. One of the key concerns in this paper is the possibility to verify the correctness of the interorganizational workflow. The dynamics of the marketplace, with rapid changing business processes and relationships, underlines the need for verification tools.     

Pattern-based e-service modelling for virtual service enterprises

Business services are customisable, interactive processes that providers have the potential to carry out together with clients that benefit from the effects. It is understood that business service transactions are best organised by means of virtual networks, where information technology allows for configuring multiple providers and processes on a per-request basis. Existing conceptual models for virtual service enterprises (VSEs) propose business service virtualisation for flexible and agile regulation and control of coordination between multiple providers and clients. In this paper, we present an approach for realising business service virtualisation based on software service technology. In particular, we propose a service-oriented software architecture for representing virtual business service processes as e-services. E-service models specify flexible business service interactions between multiple providers and clients of virtual service enterprises and allow for regulation and enforcement of their coordination. We demonstrate the utilisation of our e-service SOA in the context of an e-science scenario, where we show how to design e-service models for the use case of virtual polymorph prediction laboratories.     

IT Outsourcing Impacts on Enterprise Architecture

Enterprises outsource IT for many reasons, such as reducing costs, shedding of overhead functions that divert management attention away from the core business, and obtaining services from industry leaders specializing in the associated competencies. IT sourcing profoundly impacts the client organization's enterprise architecture. In an outstanding scenario, IT services come from an external services provider. Moreover, the client and vendor interact through an interorganizational interface containing operational, technical, and business components. This interface involves two major modes of interaction: delivery of the IT services and the service-management framework. The interface describes all of the processes, procedures, and protocols that the client and provider use to interact. Because enterprise architectures are unique to organizations, designing this interface might involve customization. For a large, complex client enterprise, bringing the business, operational, and technical components of the interface into alignment is often a nontrivial challenge     

Semantic information assurance for secure distributed knowledge management: a business process perspective

Secure knowledge management for eBusiness processes that span multiple organizations requires intraorganizational and interorganizational perspectives on security and access control issues. There is paucity in research on information assurance of distributed interorganizational eBusiness processes from a business process perspective. This paper presents a framework for secure semantic eBusiness processes integrating three streams of research, namely: 1) eBusiness processes; 2) information assurance; and 3) semantic technology. This paper presents the conceptualization and analysis of a secure semantic eBusiness process framework and architecture, and provides a holistic view of a secure interorganizational semantic eBusiness process. This paper fills a gap in the existing literature by extending role-based access control models for eBusiness processes that are done by using ontological analysis and semantic Web technologies to develop a framework for computationally feasible secure eBusiness process knowledge representations. An integrated secure eBusiness process approach is needed to provide a unifying conceptual framework to understand the issues surrounding access control over distributed information and knowledge resources.     

The impacts of competence-trust and openness-trust on interorganizational systems

Trust can have imperative influences on the use of interorganizational systems (IOSs). Management, sociology and psychology literature distinguish different types of trust and attribute distinctive impacts to these types. However, little is known regarding the influences of different types of trust on IOSs usage. This paper focuses on how trust based on partner competence and trust based on partner openness influence the use of IOS-related resources. Hypotheses are constructed relying on the use of the resource-based view and transaction-cost economics to analyse influences on relationship specificity of four types of IOS-related resources: business processes, human knowledge, organizational domain knowledge and IOS infrastructure. Three case studies are conducted on interorganizational relationships employing IOSs. Competence-trust is found to positively influence the use of human-knowledge resources, resources related to interlinkage of business processes and organizational domain knowledge resources. Openness-trust is found to positively influence use of human-knowledge resources and organizational domain-knowledge resources.     

An empirical study of information technology enabled business process redesign and corporate competitive strategy

Business process redesign (BPR) has been widely touted as a means for leveraging the power of information technology to change business processes radically, resulting in substantial improvements in organizational effectiveness and efficiency. This study represents an early attempt at examining the strategic nature of the phenomenon. Because BPR is radical change and has the ability to alter both the competitive and operational nature of the corporation, it is critical that BPR be coordinated with corporate strategy. Through a survey of information system executives, the relationships between corporate competitive strategy and three types of BPR – intrafunctional, interfunctional and interorganizational – were examined. It was found that organizations following a cost strategy tended to do more BPR projects on interfunctional processes. Furthermore, the positive effect of a cost strategy on interfunctional BPR was found to be strengthened by the degree of integration of IS and business planning. It was also found that while interorganizational BPR was not related to a specific strategy, it was strongly related directly with IS–business planning integration.     

Querying business processes with BP-QL

We present in this paper BP-QL, a novel query language for querying business processes. The BP-QL language is based on an intuitive model of business processes, an abstraction of the emerging BPEL (business process execution language) standard. It allows users to query business processes visually, in a manner very analogous to how such processes are typically specified, and can be employed in a distributed setting, where process components may be provided by distinct providers.     

EFSOC: A Layered Framework for Developing Secure Interactions between Web-Services

Enterprises are rapidly extending their relatively stable and internally-oriented business processes and applications with loosely-coupled enterprise software services in order to support highly dynamic, cross-organizational business processes. These services are no longer solely based on internal enterprise systems, but often implemented, deployed and executed by diverse, external service providers. The ability to dynamically configure cross-organizational business processes with a mixture of internal and external services imposes new security requirements on existing security models. In this paper, we address the problem of defining and enforcing access control rules for securing service invocations in the context of a business process. For this purpose, we amortize existing role-based access control models that allow for dynamic delegation and retraction of authorizations. Authorizations are assigned on an event-driven basis, implementing a push-based interaction protocol between services. This novel security model is entitled the Event-driven Framework for Service Oriented Computing (EFSOC). In addition, this article presents an experimental prototype that is explored using a realistic case study. This work has been partially funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the PRONIR project. Recommended by: Asuman Dogac     

One step ahead: using predictive inference to select service providers in loosely coupled electronic markets

The rapid growth of service-oriented electronic markets implies a common belief among managers that participation in these dynamic, loosely coupled markets can yield many benefits for their firms. At present, however, very little is known about organizational behavior in these nascent markets. By utilizing a sophisticated simulation of a loosely coupled interorganizational service market, this paper demonstrates that customer organizations seeking to purchase and consume services in such markets can benefit from the application of predictive inference in the provider selection process. Specifically, it is shown that a customer organization employing a simple predictive method to select service providers can, in the aggregate, achieve notably superior outcomes in terms of price, quality of service received, and several other metrics when compared to competitors who act opportunistically in selecting their business partners. The implications of these findings for managers and researchers are presented and discussed in the context of the rising popularity of loosely coupled electronic markets.     

A distributed architecture for policy-customisable multi-tenant processes-as-a-service

Service-based business processes are often developed and deployed by single organisations. In distributed, shared resource environments like the cloud on the other hand, consumers share resources owned by cloud providers. This requires multi-tenancy capability for service processes that provide customised behaviour on shared process implementations to meet the varying needs of different process consumers as tenants of the process resource. In this paper, we define a distributed multi-tenant architecture for Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes provided as a service. A single-version BPEL process is deployed by a provider and offered for all process consumers, combined with a customisation and management functionality to create a unique experience for different consumers (process tenants). We provide two core components: a policy model for consumers to express customisation/business requirements of service processes and a coordination framework for policy enforcement between consumers and providers to achieve on-the-fly customisation of service processes.