EVALUATION OF INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESS SOLUTIONS:
A CONCEPTUAL MODEL-BASED APPROACH
Johny Ghattas and Pnina Soffer
Management Information Systems
University of Haifa, Carmel Mountain 31905, Haifa, Israel
Email: ,
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ABSTRACT
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.
Keywords: Inter-organizational processes, Business process design, Conceptual model, RosettaNet, P2P, CWM, Privacy, Autonomy, Flexibility.
1. Introduction
Collaboration and coordination between organizations are considered necessary in a business environment, where organizations focus on their competitive advantage and complement their offering through partners and suppliers. Inter-organizational processes are the enabler of such business environments.
Various mechanisms at various levels of detail have been proposed for achieving interoperability or shared business processes among organizations. Most of them focus on implementation details (e.g., [1]).
A key issue discussed in the literature with respect to inter-organizational processes is the required balance between trust and control, visibility and privacy. Addressing this delicate balance, solutions vary from complete central control to pure distribution. Various models [2][3][4][5][6] are proposed, where an inter-organizational workflow is defined as part or as a result of a contract between organizations. The organizations are then contractually committed to the defined workflow (or to a partial definition). Different levels of visibility of a partner’s internal process by the other partners at run time are also proposed and supported. In general, a high degree of central control and required visibility imposes constraints on the internal operations of an organization, thus reduces its flexibility.
Given this variety of approaches, it is difficult to assess and evaluate which one is better suited for a given situation. This difficulty is particularly severe considering the absence of a standard vocabulary or set of concepts in this domain, so each solution has its own terminology. Furthermore, going into implementation details and solutions, many of these approaches do not rely on a theoretical basis or explicit requirements specified in business terms. We claim that an implementation solution needs to rely on a solid conceptual model, depicting the essence of shared business processes and needs the solution must realize. Such model should enable the assessment of a proposed solution in terms of its completeness and compliance with the behavior required in a specific situation.
This paper proposes a conceptual model of inter-organizational processes, which aims at identifying the minimal definition required to enable a smooth operation of shared processes, while allowing the partners a maximal degree of privacy and flexibility. The model, based on the formal Generic Process Model (GPM) and Bunge’s ontology, is at a rather high level of abstraction, and does not address implementation details. It includes a set of concepts which are well-defined and generic, relating to a set of business-oriented requirements whose focus is autonomy and privacy. As such, it can form a basis for evaluating implementation models and solutions when such business requirements are due. The paper proposes such evaluation procedure and demonstrates it with respect to three existing inter-organizational process frameworks.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: The next section provides a literature review to motivate this current work. Then a brief introduction to the main concepts of GPM is made, as a basis for the presentation of inter-organizational process model. The following section presents the use of our model as a benchmark for evaluating inter-organizational process solution approaches, and demonstrates it with respect to three well-known approaches. This evaluation is discussed and finally, conclusions are drawn.
2. Related work
The literature about business process modeling offers a rich variety of solutions for implementing business processes within organizations and between organizations. The proposed solutions differ from each other in the implementation details, in the scope of issues addressed, and in the level of privacy and autonomy granted to the participating organizations.
For example, [7] addresses interaction among workflows (both within and between organizations). They suggest a mechanism for exchanging events between interacting workflows. Their work provides a technical mechanism that allows workflow interactions, and a means for specifying them in workflow models. Privacy and autonomy of the organizations are enabled since the workflows interchange events and do not expose further information. Another example is [8], who propose to model inter-organizational processes using UML, combined with a translation of the model into a designated formal language (COALA). Their approach, which enables specification of the interaction among roles (organizations), management of shared resources, and exception handling, is focused on dependability and error recovery at run time.
Infrastructures, such as XRL/flower [1], are designed to support the exchange of information required by inter-organizational business processes. Means for defining the process are provided. However, the support of flexibility and autonomy of the participating organizations is not explicitly addressed, and can be assured only within a specific process. A business contract language (XLBC) was introduced in [9] to formally link the component definition language (CDL) specification of workflow systems based on business objects. The authors briefly discuss the object visibility specified through contracts, but do not go into details. Infrastructural issues also include the work on process specification standards (BPMI [10]; ebXML BPSS [11], BPMN [12]; W3C [13]; OASIS [14]). E-business standards, traditionally focused on simple message exchange between organizations, have been expanding to consider structured sequences of messages and the process implications behind such sequences. Considering privacy and autonomy issues, the Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) proposed an interface (WF-XML) that allows variable degrees of visibility between organizations [15].
A different direction for approaching the inter-organizational process is by addressing the relationships between organizations. [5][4] deal with legal contracts between organizations, and show how a detailed workflow can be derived from a contract. They also provide rules for matching the contract-based workflow with the existing organizational business processes. The contract-based workflow relates to the entire process, thus it allows no flexibility to a single organization for changing the process or deviating from it in specific cases. In [6] the focus is on the privacy of organizational processes, which is maintained at run time, limiting the visibility of the internal process. However, the entire workflow has to be defined at build time, when a contract between the parties is established. Being contractually obligated to the workflow model, the flexibility of the parties is limited. In [2], the contract specifies the internal process of the “service provider” party and the interface between the organizations, and allows a limited visibility of the provider process. Here autonomy and flexibility are reduced only for the “provider” party, and not for the other side.
The PRODNET project [16] is aimed at facilitating autonomy and heterogeneity of organizations participating in a virtual organization. However, their solution is based on a central mandating and coordinating party, to whom all parties must report. This requirement forms a limitation on the privacy and autonomy of the participants.
A model that includes a means for process verification, both between and within the organizations, is proposed by [17]. Steps in defining the inter-organizational process are proposed, facilitating some privacy and autonomy of partners through workflow views and inheritance.
Autonomy of the partners is also facilitated by the ebXML BPSS model [11]. However, its evaluation on the basis of Bunge’s ontology [18] indicates a lack of ontological completeness as well as clarity, which may lead to modeling and interpretation difficulties.
Clearly, when more constraints are imposed by the inter-organizational process, less flexibility can exist in the internal processes of an organization [19][20].
Summarizing the above review of related literature, we observe that the issue of inter-organizational process modeling and support has been extensively addressed. Yet, while the proposed solutions strive to enable the operation of an inter-organizational process, no explicit consideration of specific business requirements is made to relate specific solutions to specific business scenarios.
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3. Deriving Inter-organizational Business process requirements
For any formal conceptual model to be complete and valid, the ontological assumptions of the model need to be made explicit. In this paper we have set our major objective to establish a model that would maximize the interacting parties' autonomy and privacy while not losing the run time governance of the inter-organizational process.
Our model is designed to satisfy the following set of requirements, which emphasize the privacy and autonomy of the participating organizations, as well as the operational feasibility of the process.
(1) No central governance of the over-all process. There is no entity that designs, implements, executes, and monitors the end-to-end process. This requirement follows the assumption that central governance reduces the autonomy of the parties and may require visibility to details that are not necessarily visible in a purely distributed process. Hence, organizations’ privacy and autonomy is expected to be higher in purely distributed processes as compared to centrally governed ones.
(2) Partners' business privacy conservation. Each partner shares the minimum needed information for enabling the over-all process design, implementation, and enactment.
(3) Partners' business autonomy conservation. Each partner has a full autonomy to design, implement, execute and monitor its internal processes, provided they comply with the partner's obligations toward the other partners.
(4) Process run time governance assurance. All collaborating partners need to have governance of the overall process status at all time. Since visibility is limited, such governance can be based on mutual commitments, which reduce the uncertainty and foment the trust among the partners.
Note that these are among the most restrictive requirements that may be set for a valid inter-organizational process definition. When privacy and autonomy are not at the top priority of the organizations, these requirements may not be necessarily relevant and some of them may need to be relaxed or even eliminated.
Once we have established a conceptual model that complies with these requirements, we would be able to evaluate business process (BP) design and implementation models on the basis of the conceptual model.
4. The conceptual model
The proposed model builds upon the Generic Process Model (GPM) and extends it to incorporate the relevant concepts for modeling inter-organizational business processes. GPM does not explicitly address inter-organizational processes. We will first briefly present GPM and to extend it to a conceptual model that addresses inter-organizational processes.
4.1 The Generic Process Model
This section introduces the Generic process Model (GPM), which is the basis of our inter-organizational process conceptual model. GPM is based on Bunge’s ontology [21][22], as adapted for information systems modeling (e.g.,[23][24]), for conceptual modeling, and for modeling business process concepts.
According to the ontological framework, the world is made of things that possess properties. Properties are perceived by humans in terms of attributes, which can be represented as functions on time. The state of a thing is the set of values of all its attribute functions (also termed state variables). When properties of things change, these changes are manifested as state changes or events. State changes can happen either due to internal transformations in things (self action of a thing) or due to interactions among things. Properties that establish relations between things are mutual properties, while properties that relate only to one thing are intrinsic to that thing. The rules governing possible states and state changes are termed state laws and transformation laws, respectively. States can be classified as being stable or unstable, where an unstable state is a state that must change by law, and a stable state is a state that can only change as a result of an event external to the thing or the domain.
A domain is a part of the world, namely, a set of things and their interactions. It is represented by a set of state variables, whose values represent the state of the domain at a moment in time. A sub-domain is a part of the domain, represented by a subset of the domain state variables.
A process is a sequence of unstable states, transforming by law until a stable state is reached. A process is defined over a domain, which sets the boundaries of what is in a stable or an unstable state. Events that occur outside the domain are external events and they can activate the domain when it is in a stable state.
A process model in GPM is a three-tuple <L, I, G>, where L is the law, specified as mapping between subsets of states; I is a subset of unstable states, which are the initial states of the process after a triggering external event has occurred; G is a subset of stable states, which are the goal of the process. Subsets of states are specified by conditions over the state variables of the domain. Hence, a process starts when a certain condition on the state of the domain holds, and ends when its goal is reached, i.e., when another condition specified on the state of the domain holds.
It is possible to define the projection of a process over a sub-domain, where the set of state variables addressed by the law is a subset of domain state variables. Then all transformations outside the sub-domain are considered external events, and the sub-domain may be in a stable state while the process is active in other parts of the domain.
The process goal as addressed by GPM is the state achieved by the process. However, the goal concept is sometimes used also to describe business objectives. GPM distinguishes process goals from soft-goals, which are defined as an order relation on goal states [25]. In other words, soft-goals relate to the desirability of possible states in the goal set (all meeting the condition that terminates the process) according to defined business objectives. For example, assume the goal of a sales process is a set of states where an order has been fulfilled, but achieving it in two days is considered "better" than in two months.