Information Technology Reference
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be characterized in non-functional terms, e.g. in terms of cost and quality. For
instance, progress information made available by contractors may be of higher
quality and cost, whereas the supplier may only have limited visibility on the
progress of an order once this is outsourced to contractors, and therefore may
provide such information at a cheaper price.
In this paper, we propose a methodology to design monitoring processes in col-
laborative business settings. The methodology considers as input the monitoring
information made available by the collaborating parties and builds monitoring
processes embedding temporal and aggregation dependencies among monitoring
information. Moreover, monitoring information in our methodology can be de-
scribed also in non-functional terms, e.g. by cost, quality, and availability. Among
the set of possible alternatives, the proposed methodology allows the selection
of the monitoring process satisfying also the party non-functional requirements,
e.g. the minimum cost monitoring process or the highest quality process, given
a budget constraint.
The design of the monitoring process for cross-organizational business pro-
cesses is framed as a PBWD (Product-Based Workflow Design, [16,20,22]) prob-
lem. PBWD is an analytical method for automatically deriving business process
specifications from the set of information products involved in the process and
their dependencies. In the monitoring of collaborative processes, information
products are represented by the monitoring information made available by the
actors involved in the collaboration.
The paper is organised as follows. Related work is discussed in Section 2, while
Section 3 introduces the background on PBWD and explains its novel applica-
tion to the problem of cross-organizational process monitoring. The architecture
to integrate the PBWD design of monitoring processes in a service-oriented en-
vironment is presented in Section 4, while conclusions are eventually drawn in
Section 5.
2 Related Work
Monitoring of cross-organizational business processes has been investigated, from
a requirements engineering perspective, in [7] and [11]. In order to achieve
a successful collaboration, both papers stress the importance of process- and
communication-oriented mechanisms to transmit relevant information to inter-
ested parties across the network. Similarly, [5] considers the need to define ex-
ternal information requirements, i.e. information required by a consumer from
its providers to correctly monitor and enforce a multiparty contract.
From the design and implementation perspectives, the CrossFlow [8] and
CrossWork [9] projects consider architectural support for cross-organizational
business processes. Both projects investigate issues such as the design of flexible
architecture to support monitoring [9] and the definition of specific monitor-
ing points in electronic contracts [8]. Monitoring, however, is still considered
information-centric, i.e. the dependency among monitoring information prod-
ucts produced by various sources or the aggregation of monitoring information
from several parties are not considered.
