A Framework for Service Outsourcing Using Process Views

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizations. The paper introduces a conceptual framework to support service outsourcing using process views. The framework gives rules that can be used to construct a process view from a conceptual process and vice versa. Based on these rules, the framework defines several projection relations that can exist between conceptual processes of consumers and providers and their process views. Finally, the framework gives a set of configuration options that specify which combinations of projection relations are useful for service consumers and service providers. The framework is applied in a BPEL-based case study.