Virtual Organizations (VO)—a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities—have become popular in today’s technology driven business environment. Due to their autonomous and interdependent nature, management of collaboration among such organizations is a challenging task. Although many solutions have been proposed over the past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by traditional solutions such as ebXML, RosettaNet and EDI. In this research, we present a framework for process management in service oriented virtual organizations and a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The framework contains 6 layers with multiple components within each layer. In designing the components of the framework, standard reference architecture such as the Open-EDI reference model and the S3 service oriented architecture, as well as best practices such as ITIL V3 and PMBOK are used. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peer-to-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere ™ products. We demonstrate that VOs built with our framework and implementation architecture facilitate flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution.

Virtual Organizations (VO)—a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities—have become popular in today’s technology driven business environment. Due to their autonomous and interdependent nature, management of collaboration among such organizations is a challenging task. Although many solutions have been proposed over the past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by traditional solutions such as ebXML, RosettaNet and EDI. In this research, we present a framework for process management in service oriented virtual organizations and a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The framework contains 6 layers with multiple components within each layer. In designing the components of the framework, standard reference architecture such as the Open-EDI reference model and the S3 service oriented architecture, as well as best practices such as ITIL V3 and PMBOK are used. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peer-to-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere ™ products. We demonstrate that VOs built with our framework and implementation architecture facilitate flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution.