Workshop Proceedings
Background
This workshop explores the emerging area of managing and coordinating complex end-to-end processes that are carried out collaboratively by several organizations. Globalization, specialization, and innovation are changing many aspects of how businesses operate. Many large organizations that were self sufficient and could dictate processes to their partners and suppliers are now finding this model hard to sustain. Rather, large scale multi-organization endeavors are becoming the new norm, yet at significant costs. Global Software Development of complex systems has a 50% failure rate, and projects that do make it can take up to three times longer than planned. The complexity and innovation required to develop a new airplane is so demanding that no OEM can do it on its own. A new model of cross-enterprise collaboration is emerging in the aerospace industry whereby the development of a new airplane is managed by a consortium of companies that jointly work on its development, share the financial risk, and require their suppliers to integrate deliverables directly into the product assembly. Similar trends can be observed in the automotive industry. However, overall project failures, uncontrollable delays, and significant financial losses indicate the importance of finding new ways to better support cross-enterprise work.
Many factors contribute to the intricacy of the problem, including scope, complexity, and unpredictability. Such processes span the full scope of activities relating to a critical business goal and different parts of the processes need to be carried out by different organizations. Yet many organizations resist being dictated how to do their work, neither will they agree to expose to others their internal procedures, especially if they are differentiating capabilities. An added complexity is that there really isn’t just one process but rather many autonomous processes that must interoperate as a whole; such processes are also known as choreographies. For example, the process managing the overall development of a new airplane must continuously interact with many instances of change and defect management processes. Finally, many things can and do impact the project, thus forcing the process itself to continuously adapt and evolve from its initial definition. These include people errors, unclear requirements, or faulty designs. But often they may have nothing to do with the project and its realization, e.g., new technologies, changes in government regulations, or natural disasters. When things go wrong, deciding how best to respond can also get complicated, as different organizations may have different concerns that can conflict.
Current approaches vary widely and address different aspects of the problem. On the one hand, Business Process Management (BPM) paradigms have been extended to support cross-organizational processes. This can enable automating the interoperation of business activities between the collaborating organizations through Service Oriented Computing (SOC). A different approach can be seen in the creation of service ecosystems where predefined procedures and semi-, or full automation handle anticipated cases. When unpredictable things happen, applications in the ecosystem support human experts to drive recovery and complement the existing procedures; as in disaster recovery Command and Control centers. Finally, Crowd Sourcing is emerging as a new paradigm for managing some aspects of both inter and intra-enterprise work. However, research on relating this to the larger context of cross-enterprise work, collaboration, or business processes is still at its infancy.
Workshop Goals
The goal of this workshop is to foster research in the emerging area of cross enterprise collaboration. We invite researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines to exchange ideas and collaboratively explore different aspects of this area. A keynote address will be followed by presentations. The workshop will end with a collaborative discussion aimed at identifying core research challenges alongside promising approaches for future work. The outcome will be published as a Manifesto in the workshop post-proceedings alongside the papers.
Workshop Themes
The workshop theme and preliminary research questions for which we encourage submissions include, but are not limited to:
- Models, methods, formalisms, and languages that focus on the control and coordination of cross-enterprise collaboration in different domains
- Dynamic flow engines that can support such models and provide the flexibility required for runtime adaptation and evolution
- Adaptation, versioning and evolution of process, work, collaborating organizations and collaboration patterns
- Metrics, sensors, and E2E monitoring that span both the horizontal cross-enterprise collaboration and the vertical stacks of providers and suppliers
- Governance, safeguarding and securing management and coordination across the collaborating enterprises and their providers and suppliers
- Non-functional aspects such as trust and reputation, quality, and so on, in cross-organizational ecosystems definable in service-level agreements
- Extending SOA formalisms and constructs to facilitate the definition, dispatch, and orchestration of work as services that can be carried out by and for organizations
- Context, data, and knowledge management as required for managing and coordinating work across organizations and their interrelationship with the domain data, tools, and processes
- Processes that are intended to support cross enterprise collaboration and their relationship to domain specific processes
- IT, middleware, systems, tools, and framework that support cross enterprise collaboration, and their relationship with current enterprise or domain specific tools and IT
- The role of people and other resources in the management and coordination of cross-enterprise work
- Utilization of Crowd Sourcing and social computing paradigms for the coordination and/or execution of work and business processes that span across organizational boundaries
- The application of centralized Command and Control centers that act as Hubs to facilitate crossorganization collaboration
- What is cross enterprise collaboration and what does it mean for organizations to collaborate? How does it differ from people or team collaborations?
- Use cases and examples of successful cross-organization collaborations in different domains
For additional details, dates, and submission instructions please visit the workshop website.
Website: http://tinyurl.com/cecPaw2010
Submission system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cecpaw2010