Facilitating B2B E-business by IT-supported business process negotiation services

Due to the complexity of business transactions andgrowing business automation demands from the B2B e-businesscommunity to swiftly respond to the ever-changing environment,workflow technology has been receiving more attention recently.The increasing popularity and adoption of workflow managementsystem (WfMS) within organisations make workflow-based B2Be-business practically viable since more and more businesstransactions are implemented as automated processes andexecuted by WfMSs. Having been viewed as services by manyresearchers and practitioners, process-driven B2B e-business areconducted through service discovery and runtime execution.However, if there is no existing service provided by a desiredbusiness partner that matches the requirement then such aprocess will have to be negotiated and then created.Unfortunately, direct people-to-people negotiation followed bymanual transformation of the negotiation outcome into processdrivenservices can be very resource consuming. Therefore, it isidentified that there is a research gap in computer-aidednegotiation approach for process-driven B2B e-business. Thispaper introduces essentials of workflow technology andnegotiation. It then describes ways of capturing elements ofnegotiation from an operational view point. Finally, it explainshow to integrate the IT-supported negotiation services into anoverall cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO)supporting framework.