IT supported business process negotiation, reconciliation and execution for cross-organisational e-business collaboration

In modern enterprises, workflow technology is commonly used for business processautomation. Established business processes represent successful business practice andbecome a crucial part of corporate assets. In the Internet era, electronic business is chosenby more and more organisations as a preferred way of conducting business practice. Inresponse to the increasing demands for cross-organisational business automation, especiallythose raised by the B2B electronic commerce community, the concept of collaborationbetween automated business processes, i.e. workflow collaboration, is emerging. Otherwise,automation would be confined within individual organisations and cross-organisationalcollaboration would still have to be carried out manually.However, much of the previous research work overlooks the acquisition of the compatibleworkflows at build time and simply assumes that compatibility is achieved through face-tofacenegotiation followed by a design from scratch approach that creates collaborativeworkflows based on the agreement resulted from the negotiation. The resource-intensive anderror-prone approach can hardly keep up with the pace of today’s marketplace withincreasing transaction volume and complexity.This thesis identifies the requirements for cross-organisational workflow collaboration(COWCO) through an integrated approach, proposes a comprehensive supportingframework, explains the key enabling techniques of the framework, and implements andevaluates them in the form of a prototype system – COWCO-Guru. With the support of sucha framework, cross-organisational workflow collaboration can be managed and conductedwith reduced human effort, which will further facilitate cross-organisational e-business,especially B2B e-commerce practices.