Managing process and service fusion in virtual enterprises

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are businesses providing services and products th at rely on the resources of multiple enterprises. VEs can achieve their bus iness objectives only through effective collaboration between the autonomou s enterprises that comprise them. In this paper we advocate the position th at effective multi-enterprise collaboration can be achieved by integrating the business processes of the participant enterprises, and by managing the resulting multi-enterprise (business) processes. A key requirement for this is developing multi-enterprise processes that explicitly capture and manag e the functional and contractual relationships between the enterprises in a VE. In particular, this includes the inter-enterprise services each enterp rise in a VE provides to others as needed to realize multi-enterprise proce sses. Current process management technology does not deal with the heteroge neity and autonomy of the processes that need to be integrated in a multi-e nterprise process. In addition, existing solutions that combine services an d multi-enterprise processes either lead to specification explosion or disa llow conversations between process activities and services. The Collaborati on Management Infrastructure (CMI) addresses these problems by extending an advanced workflow model with a comprehensive set of service management pri mitives. These include service interfaces, service activities, primitives f or coordinating service activities, service wrapper processes, as well as s ervice quality and contracts. A CMI system that supports these has been dev eloped by integrating existing software components, such as a commercial wo rkflow system, with several prototype engines and tools that support the ne w primitives for multi-enterprise process and service management. To illust rate how CMI supports these, we use multi-enterprise process and service ex amples from the telecommunications industry. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.