Architecting cross-organisational B2B interactions

Process orientation is used increasingly as an approach to streamlining formerly inefficient business procedures and workflow management systems are frequently deployed IT systems to support this. The large number of workflow management systems available in the market and a growing demand for workflow systems demonstrates this trend. However in a world of electronic interconnectivity, the concepts for process automation within a single organisation need to be extended to support co-operation with customers and partners in different organisations. Current workflow standards bodies provide limited support to enable this interconnectivity. They provide interfaces and data structures for interoperability but they do not address various aspects of the confidentiality of internal structures of process; those that bring a competitive edge. The paper outlines our approach for dealing with these inter-organisational aspects. We propose a model for tiering business processes into organisations' private business processes and shared business processes that interconnect them. Private business processes can expose interaction points and shared processes can link to these points so that an overall business process may span two or more organisations. The interaction points can selectively expose information about an organisation's processes, process tasks and roles. The paper also presents how these modelling ideas can be supported by a corresponding architecture and describes a prototype that implements key ideas of the architecture.