Aligning Collaborative Business Processes—An Organization-Oriented Perspective

Business collaboration encompasses the coordination of information flows among organizations as well as the composition of their business processes toward mutual benefits. While integrating business processes of different organizations seamlessly, it brings great challenges to keep participating organizations as autonomous entities. To address this issue, we propose a new perspective on modeling collaborative business processes with a novel concept called relative workflow (RWF). With its visibility control mechanism, the RWF model defines what a participating organization can perceive in collaboration and thereby allows each organization to customize its own collaboration process and behaviors. In this paper, we present a formal definition of RWFs and related algorithms for generating RWFs. A prototype is implemented on the Web service platform for the proof-of-concept purpose.