Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient
and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is
required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an
adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web
services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations
across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services
support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the
Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two.
We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross -organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management
and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps.
By: Paul Grefen, Heiko Ludwig, Asit Dan, Samuil Angelov
Published in: RC22728 in 2003
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