Inter—Organizational Workflows for Enterprise Coordination

Abstract

Workflow systems are widely adopted by organizations for supporting business processes. In particular, workflow systems help organizations to coordinate the different actors involved in the business process by automating repetitive tasks and facilitating the distribution of documents, information, and control. Today’s workflow systems however do not adequately support processes that cross the boundaries of multiple organizations. The enhancement of workflow systems in this direction, Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOWs), is essential given the growing need for organizations to cooperate and coordinate their activities in order to meet the new demands of highly dynamic markets. This paper starts by describing some of the issues related to the collaboration among organizations, pointing out a number of factors that can impact on the required support. After having introduced the basic terminology of traditional workflow and workflow systems, the chapter outlines some requirements for 10W, distinguishing between loose and tight IOW. Loose IOWs refer to occasional cooperation, free of structural constraints, where neither the involved partners nor their relationships are defined a priori. Tight IOWs refer to a structural cooperation among organizations, i.e., a cooperation based on a well-established infrastructure among pre-defined partners. Based on this distinction and the related requirements, the chapter presents two approaches to the design and the implementation of IOWs. The first approach adopts the notion of software agents for enhancing workflow systems and allowing their use in loose IOWs. The second approach, which can be supported by an agent based implementation, combines Petri Nets and Federated Databases for providing the more structured support needed by tight IOWs. Both approaches are compliant with the Workflow Management Coalition reference architecture. This guarantees the possibility to tailor the support provided by the IOW to the needs of the collaborating organizations, remaining within a coherent framework of reference.