Evaluation of inter-organizational business process solutions: A conceptual model-based approach

Collaboration and coordination between organizations are necessary in today’s business environment, and are enabled by inter-organizational processes. Many approaches for the construction of such processes have been proposed in recent years. However, due to the lack of standard terminology it is hard to evaluate and select a solution that fits a specific business scenario. The paper proposes a conceptual model which depicts the nature of interaction between organizations through business processes under specific business requirements that emphasize the privacy and autonomy of the participating organizations. The model is generic, and relies on the generic process model (GPM) framework and on Bunge’s ontology. Being generic and theory-based, we propose to use the model as a basis for comparing and evaluating design and implementation-level approaches for inter-organizational processes. We demonstrate the evaluation procedure by applying it to three existing approaches.

Pnina SofferEmail:

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Johny Ghattas   is currently a PhD student in the Management Information Systems department in the University of Haifa in Israel. He has an M.Sc. in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Valladolid in Spain, and an MBA from the Edinburgh Business College. In his professional life, Johny specializes in business process management, requirement engineering, and enterprise architecture design and implementation. His current research deals with the establishment of a business process learning framework. Pnina Soffer   is a lecturer in the Management Information Systems department in the University of Haifa in Israel. She received her Ph.D. from the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in 2002. In her Ph.D. thesis she developed a requirement-driven approach to the alignment of enterprise processes and an ERP system. Pnina also has industrial experience as a production engineer and as an ERP consultant. Her current research areas are formal methods for business process modeling, conceptual modeling, and requirements engineering.