A Semantic Approach to Secure Collaborative Inter-Organizational eBusiness Processes (SSCIOBP)

The information supply chain (ISC) involves the exchange, organization, selection, and synthesis of relevant knowledge and information about production, purchase planning, demand forecasting, and inventory among collaborating business partners in a value chain. Information and knowledge sharing in an ISC occurs in a business process context. Seamless knowledge exchange within and across organizations involved in secure business processes is critically needed to "secure and cultivate the information supply chain." Extant literature does not explicitly consider or systematically represent component knowledge, process knowledge and security knowledge for business processes within and across organizations. As a result, organizations engaged in collaborative inter-organizational processes continue to be plagued with issues such as semantic conflict issues, lack of integration of heterogeneous systems, and lack of security knowledge regarding authorized access to resources. Without appropriate security controls, manual interventions lead to unauthorized access to resources. These problems motivate our Semantic Approach to Secure Collaborative Inter-Organizational eBusiness Processes (SSCIOBP). We follow a design science paradigm to identify meta-requirements of SSCIOBP and develop the design artifact. SSCIOBP is evaluated using observational and descriptive evaluation methods following Hevner et al. (2004). We apply our approach to show how the Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) industry standard models can be enhanced using the proposed design artifact. We apply SSCIOBP to a case study to illustrate its applicability in mapping core business processes of organizations to solve semantic inter-operability issues and systematically incorporate component, process and security knowledge in the design of secure business processes across the information supply chain.