Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter XIV
Federated Process
Framework for
Transparent Process
Monitoring in Business
Process Outsourcing
Kyoung-Il Bae, IBM Business Consulting Services, Korea
Soon-Young Huh, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
ABSTRACT
Process information sharing is a benefi cial tool through which a company can monitor and
control its outsourced business process transparently, as if the outsourced business process
is performed locally. However, autonomy and agility of insourcing companies providing
outsourcing services have placed limitations in the development of process information
sharing, which the previous research has not satisfactorily addressed. This chapter proposes
a federated process framework and its system architecture that provide a conceptual design
for effective implementation of process information sharing supporting the autonomy and
agility of the insourcing companies. First, in terms of autonomy, the federated process
framework supports a fl exible sharing policy to control the amount of shared data so that
the framework can be applied to a wide variety of practical situations, from loosely-coupled
cases to tightly-coupled cases. Second, in terms of agility, the system architecture based on
the federated process framework supports the entire life cycle of business process outsourcing
by allowing suffi cient adaptability to the changes of business environments. We develop the
framework using an object-oriented database and Extensible Markup Language to accom-
modate all the constructs and their interactions within object-oriented message exchange
model in a distributed computing environment.
