Abstract
Increasing interconnection of organizations is a global trend. Independent organizational units or entire organizations build temporary or permanent collaborations, which pool resources, capabilities, and information to achieve a common objective (Sydow, 1993). New business models are emerging and existing ways of working are redesigned forming long running processes between various (external) partners—so called Cross- Organisational Business Processes (CBPs). In order to realize a collaborative scenario in an efficient and effective manner, it is necessary to design, manage, and optimize CBPs on a global level. This requires the externalization of internal information of every single partner in the network.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaborative Business Process (CBP): A CBP describes the interactions between two or more business entities from a neutral perspective, capturing all allowed interactions between all partners.
View Process (VP): A VP abstracts information from one or more PPs and thus enables companies to hide critical information from unauthorized partners. It is an interface to the outside world which extracts only that kind of information which is necessary for the interaction with one or more potential partners. Thus, a VP can be seen as general interaction description of one or more PPs from the perspective of one partner.
Protocol: A protocol specifies all sequences of message exchanges that are allowed in a collaborative scenario between two or more parties.
Functional alienation: Functional alienation is the nondisclosure of the exact operational activities that are operated in the context of a process execution. The presence of a specific task is not concealed; however, specific details of the activity are masked while the process structure remains unchanged.
Private Processes (PP): PPs refer to a specific organization and are the type of processes that have been generally called workflow processes.
Processural Alienation: Processural alienation describes circumstances in which the process owner wants to limit information about the structure of parts of its process. The structure in this respect means the time and fact-logical relationships between process functions. This can be achieved by the shortening of processing parts or by shrinking. In this case, a part of the real process is reduced to a single function.
Abstraction: Abstraction is a method for deriving VPs from PPs. An abstract process model results from the abstraction of some characteristics, that is, from variability of some elements of the PP. This mainly concerns the functions, which are suitable for abstraction. An abstract process model describes the possibility for process models by making several attribute values possible for some model elements. The effect is that it discloses details of process functions by allowing them to take different designs. Therefore, abstraction is suitable to create functionally alienated process models.