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.
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Notes
Note that synchronous actions in both organizations are possible according to the model. Even so, at the synchronization point the process might be waiting for an external event and will not proceed without it.
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Appendix: Models detailed mapping
Appendix: Models detailed mapping
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Ghattas, J., Soffer, P. Evaluation of inter-organizational business process solutions: A conceptual model-based approach. Inf Syst Front 11, 273–291 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-008-9090-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-008-9090-7