A Framework for Process and Performance Management in Service Oriented Virtual Organizations

Abstract

Virtual Organization (VO) is a network of autonomous organizations sharing their competitive advantage to address a specific business opportunity. Due to autonomy of partners and the temporal and dynamic nature of VOs, collaborative VO management is crucial to its success. In addition, performance measurement plays an important role in non-centralized VO management solutions. In this research, we present a framework for process and performance management in service oriented virtual organizations. The framework comprises of 6 layers including an integrated performance management framework. In designing the components of the framework, standard reference architectures such as Open-EDI reference model and the IBM S3 Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), as well as best practices such as ITIL V3, PMBOK, SCOR and ECOLEAD are used. In addition to the framework, a distributed SOA-based architecture for business process execution and performance measurement is discussed. The proposed architecture is built using service zone specifications residing in each partner organization. It uses current SOA infrastructure of partner organizations to shape service zones which are federated into a virtual infrastructure that facilitates business process synchronization and execution. This infrastructure supports any of the common VO interaction topologies known as supply chain, star and peer-to-peer. This research facilitates inert-organizational business process design, synchronization of partner processes, collaborative performance management and distributed process automation in service oriented virtual organizations.