Collaboration Viewpoint for Modeling Cross-Organizational Business Concerns

Abstract

Organizations very often need to collaborate to achieve their business goals. Hereby it is important that the collaboration concerns are properly identified and reflected in their businesses. In practice, the business process design and architecture design are often carried out separately. This often leads to a misalignment between the business process and architecture design, a problem which becomes more severe when multiple collaborating organizations are involved. To address this problem, it is important to provide the proper design abstractions that can be used to detect and correct misalignments. To this end, we propose the architecture collaboration viewpoint that can be used by teams of business analysts and software architects when addressing business collaboration concerns. The collaboration viewpoint uses elements from business process and architecture viewpoints to provide new modeling artifacts for alignment. The design artefacts are mapping tables and workflow pattern diagrams that are used to identify misalignments and redesign the business processes. The viewpoint facilitates the communication between business analysts and architects. We illustrate the collaboration viewpoint for a food supply chain transparency system from a real industrial case study.