Networked Business Process Management

In the current economy, a shift can be seen from stand-alone business organizations to networks of tightly collaborating business organizations. To allow this tight collaboration, business process management in these collaborative networks is becoming increasingly important. This paper discusses automated support for this networked business process management: automated means to manage business processes that span multiple autonomous organizations. The author starts this paper with a treatment of intra- and inter-organizational business processes to provide a conceptual background for business process management in business networks. The author describes a number of research approaches in this area, including the context of these approaches and the architectures of the automated systems proposed by them. The approaches are described from early developments in the field relying on dedicated technology to current designs based on standardized technology in a service-oriented context. The paper thereby provides an overview of developments in the area of inter-organizational business process management in the spectrum from simple, static business networks to complex, dynamic networks. The author observes that the described BPM research efforts move from pushing new BPM technology into application domains to using BPM to realize business-IT alignment in complex application contexts.