Database Reference
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the activity-level sharing policy and seamless process model integration. Consequently,
the federated process framework overcomes the autonomy problem by supporting fl exible
sharing policies, and accommodates wide applicability to various practical situations, from
loosely-coupled cases to tightly-coupled cases.
Second, to solve the agility problem, we proposed the system architecture based on the
federated process framework. In this architecture, process models and sharing policies are
separated from the application programs and are managed in the process model repository.
When a participant's process model or sharing policy is changed, associated external and
integrated process models are automatically generated through the second and third steps
of the federated process framework. Then, the system architecture can adapt itself to the
change just by revising the contents of the process model repository. The presented object
data model and XML document structure make it possible to achieve such adaptability by
providing conceptual designs that can be extended for the actual development of the process
model repository and change notifi cation procedure. As a result, the system architecture ad-
dresses the agility problem and allows suffi cient adaptability to support the entire life cycle
of process information sharing. By adding physical system capabilities such as security
control and data confl ict resolution, the proposed system architecture can be extended as a
fully-fl edged physical system design for process information sharing.
In future research, fi rst, we are extending the federated process framework to cover
the peer-to-peer model (Workfl ow Management Coalition, 1998) of the inter-organizational
process, in which local processes exchange asynchronous messages at their runtime. In
presenting the federated process framework, this chapter focuses on the hierarchical model
(Workfl ow Management Coalition, 1998), in which a local process uses a process activity
to represent other collaborating process. The hierarchical model is the most typical form
of the inter-organizational process, but the peer-to-peer model is more suitable to represent
complex business collaboration than the hierarchical model. To cover the peer-to-peer
model, the third step of the federated process framework needs to be redeveloped due to its
underlying assumption about the process activity.
Second, we plan to extend the system architecture in order to improve its applicability
in a modern business-to-business computing environment. Particularly, the service-oriented
architecture (Arsanjani, 2002) and web services (Kreger, 2003) provide underlying system
framework and platform for the actual implementation of the business process outsourcing.
In the service-oriented architecture, if a company outsources its business process, a corre-
sponding insourcing company encapsulates the outsourced business process into a service.
The outsourcing company invokes the service to communicate and collaborate with the
outsourced business process. Thus, these technologies largely simplify the system design
and implementation of the business process outsourcing. By engaging the service-oriented
architecture and the web services standard in extending the federated process framework,
we expect to make the framework more practical and widely used for the actual system
development for business process outsourcing in a modern business-to-business computing
environment.
