Peer-to-Peer-Based Model-Management for Cross-Organizational Business

Business process modeling has been developed for the single enterprise or more generally, for single actor environments. Furthermore, most process model management tools presume the usage within a closed community (e.g. a single enterprise), that is characterized by a central control unit (hierarchical management structure). Within collaborative businesses, there is a lack of centralized structures. Instead, the organizations are autonomously acting and they control only a partial area of the overall collaborative business process. In contrast to the intraorganizational case, cross-organizational model management imposes several organizational and technological challenges that results from the multiple- independent-actors-environment of collaborations. In such environments, ´conventional´ process management tools mainly fail. This paper proposes a concept to handle cross-enterprise-spanning business process models using peer-to-peer technology. Furthermore, we investigate mechanisms to construct such processes based on the same technological base