Week August 25th 2008
Last tendency on BPM
Cross-organizational Business Processes
By Ricardo Seguel P.
We are very pleased to present to Dr. Paul Grefen, Professor in Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, who shares with us one of last tendencies on Business Process Management (BPM): Cross-organizational Business Processes.
Prof. Dr.ir. Paul Grefen
Chairman Information System Department,
Technology Management Faculty,
Eindhoven University of Technology TU/e,
The Netherlands.
What are cross-organizational processes and why they are important for the industry today?
A cross-organizational business process is a business process enacted (executed) by two or more autonomous organizations, of which at least one organization exposes the explicit control flow structure of a non-black box process to the other organization(s). In other words: a cross-organizational business process is a business process crossing the boundaries of organizations, such that organizations can observe (and possibly influence) the state of the process at other organizations.
Cross-organizational business processes are important because of the way business operates nowadays. In the modern business world, we see more and more complex cooperation between autonomous organizations. In the past, business organizations often operated in ‘stand-alone’ mode or relied on rather simple cooperation with partners. Current business settings, however, often require more and more complex cooperation between organizations in order to survive. Competition has become fiercer because of the globalization of business, the advent of e commerce, increased market transparency, etcetera. Products and services to be delivered to customers are on the one hand of quickly increasing complexity, and on the other hand subject to increasingly frequent modifications and replacements. Consequently, we see the emergence of new business models that are focused on this new business context and rely on intensive collaboration between autonomous business entities. This intensive collaboration requires a process-orientation to keep the business processes of the involved organizations synchronized.
What is the relation between BPM and cross-organizational processes?
BPM is about managing business processes in general. Cross-organizational business processes are a specific class of business processes. Therefore, BPM is in principle also about managing cross-organizational business processes. But cross-organizational business processes are a complex class of processes, so require advanced BPM means.
What is your point of view about challenges by going to cross-organizational processes for a enterprise? Are there legal and contractual aspects also?
The main challenge for practice at the moment is getting to standards. This concerns both technical standards (e.g., for complete process definition languages) and business standards (e.g., for standardized processes in specific business domains).
And yes, there are legal and contractual aspects too. We will need contracts that specify the process-oriented interaction between organizations. This means that one does not only specify what is delivered between parties, but also how this is performed. And where there are contracts, there are legal issues.
Cross-organizational process are needed by all enterprise or just for a selected group of them?
They are needed by all business organizations that engage in fine-grained, highly synchronized collaboration with other business partners. This often holds for organizations that provide (parts of) complex products or services.
Do you think that cross-organizational processes are just technology related or they affect people (into an enterprise) also? Could this affects to society?
This issue affects people too. The business processes drive the tasks of people in organizations. In cross-organizational business processes, this means that people may have to rely on the work of people in other organizations more directly than they were used to without cross-organizational business processes.
August 24th 2008, Eindhoven - NL