Emerging Technologies and Standards on Business Process Management in Collaborative Networks Environments

The number of initiatives in Business Process Management (BPM) has increased significantly in the last 15 years. In spite of the large number of contributions to attempt to achieve better BPM, difficulties occur in the selection of "standards" to implement. The emerging of new organizational forms as Networked Production, Clusters and Virtual Organizations, where several organizational entities have to share the management of distributed processes, brings several challenges to BPM scientific area. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the applicability of distinct initiatives in BPM to collaborative network organisations. We analyse and compare their weaknesses and strengths focused in agility, distribution and interoperability characteristics. Emerging standards and technologies on BPM are presented follow by the mapping of them to the different domain areas. Future research issues on BPM on the scope of collaborative networks are discussed.