Positioning Collaboration in Business Process Model Consolidation in VOs

Further to sharing their knowledge and information, organizations in a VO can also benefit from sharing and even combining/consolidating their Business Processes (BPs) in order to save costs, apply their best practices, and provide value-added services. A number of challenges are associated with the needed environment for BP consolidation. Our approach to tackle these challenges is two-fold. First part is addressed in this paper and deals with the human and procedural aspects of this problem and introduces an environment to support stakeholders of independent organizations with creating common understanding of each other's BPs and manually designing/testing consolidated BPs. The second part of our approach is however outside of the scope of this paper, which develops a semi-automated mechanism and algorithms to improve efficiency of defining and disambiguating consolidated BPs. Focused on first part, this paper presents results of an empirical study investigating performance and applicability of our approach, with about eighty participants.