Towards Setting Up a Collaborative Environment to Support Collaborative Business Processes and Services with Social Interactions

In the last decade, the conjunction of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) proposals has gained many adepts both in industry and academy, as the straightforward way to connect Business Processes (BPs) with the services that implement them. Nowadays collaborative and virtual organizations need increasingly support to enact their collaborative BPs, both in centralized and decentralized scenarios. The complexity of existing systems and the variety of languages and technologies available, are key elements for the use of services allowing their seamlessly integration. In this paper we present a proposal for setting up a collaborative environment comprising: (i) a reference architecture for a process-aware inter-organizational service integration platform (PA-IOSIP) defined in previous work, based on a BPMS platform and middleware infrastructure (e.g. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)), and (ii) a maturity model which provides a roadmap to guide the efforts towards setting up such a collaborative environment. We also present a proof of concept we have carried out within the Uruguayan e-Government context.