Visibility and measurability for trust management in cooperative business operations

Abstract

Trust is essential to establish relationships with other entities like business partners and service providers. A key aspect of trust is transparency. Only by having a certain level of visibility into what others are doing on our behalf, we can build trust in our relationships with them. In this paper we present a framework and a platform for trust management that facilitates visibility and measurability into the execution of requested or outsourced services. The key benefit of the proposed approach is that service providers can offer visibility over their processes in a selective fashion, by allowing providers to define process-oriented views over business operations and by letting prospective and current customers assess process execution quality without exposing confidential information