Strategies for Cross-Organizational Service Composition

The automation of cross-organizational business processes bears great potential for companies to extend their market reach, save time, cut costs and respond to customer queries more agilely. However, technological support for the efficient organization of providing and consuming services across corporate boundaries is still not mature enough to allow for a large-scale adoption particularly among small-and medium-sized enterprises. In this article, we propose and evaluate different strategies with regard to architectures supporting the organization of service interconnections: In case of rather standardized and stable business relationships and interactions, a central service orchestration architecture, a hybrid orchestration approach with hub support and finally a fully decentralized peer-to-peer solution without any central control entity are proposed and compared in detail. In cases where business processes are highly complex, variable and dependent on situational factors, we propose a more implicit, declarative service orchestration methodology which builds upon Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs). For the different architectural strategies, we provide real-world exemplary implementations to prove their applicability and to investigate their strengths and weaknesses.