A Process- and Policy-Aware Cross Enterprise Collaboration Framework for Multisourced Services

Abstract

The increasing demand for business agility mandates enterprises to collaborate on many frontlines to stay competitive and achieve high business performance. This has given rise to the issue of Cross Enterprise Collaboration (CEC), which refers to the collaboration of two or more enterprises in achieving common goals. CEC is facing major people, process and technological challenges today. IT setup in today's enterprises makes them walled gardens, for good reasons, however, it is a prohibitor of successful collaboration among companies, their people and processes towards achieving higher performance. In this paper, we propose a framework that facilitates the understanding of major CEC challenges. Facilitating CEC requires supporting process-level collaboration, and protection of shared IP and data with various enterprise-level and regulatory policies. The framework incorporates a process-based collaboration system for conversation-oriented, flexible and policy-aware process collaboration among people from different enterprises. We focus on the scenario of the collaboration of providers in multi-sourced IT services to exemplify the problem and the proposed solution.