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multiple research findings in this area (2000, 2003,
2004 and 2005). Most of the scientific workflow
management systems and approaches to workflow
management in VENs mentioned in the previous
section can be classified in this category as well.
Again, all those publications have in common that
they do not solely concentrate on the issues but
instead more or less skip this step by only
mentioning some of them and trying to develop and
present possible solutions instead.
To facilitate future work about workflow
management in VENs, it is therefore useful to
entirely focus on the workflow management issues
that arise in VENs and to create a single place that
discusses them and shows how current workflow
management systems and prototypes of research
projects try to overcome them. For this purpose this
paper has been written.
7 CONCLUSIONS AND
FUTURE WORK
In this paper the plurality of workflow management
issues in VENs has been described and corroborated
by two real case studies of VENs in Australia. It has
been shown that people, business and technology
requirements to workflow management systems
exist and that they are not limited to an initial
configuration but rather occur during all phases of
the virtual enterprise lifecycle, even after the VEN
has been dissolved.
Although multiple efforts have been made, there
is no standardized base information architecture for
the collaboration of networked organizations so far.
Organizations as the WfMC need to provide a
suitable framework fostering formalization and
normalization of information-semantics and business
processes. Due to today’s very short life-cycles of
technology, the framework needs to be as much
open and technology independent as possible, to
preclude that the usage of technological advances is
being hindered. VENs must then make use of this
framework to increase their agility which is a
prerequisite for broadening their possibilities to
better benefit from latest market developments.
Further research, for example in the form of
focus group surveys, could help to identify
additional issues regarding workflow management in
VENs. Rating their individual severities would allow
organizations as the WfMC and manufacturers of
workflow management systems to focus in their
work on what is considered most important.
Furthermore, in-depth research could be done,
reviewing the various workflow management
systems and scientific notions and assess how well
they solve the different issues. Beyond that further
research could immediately focus on the different
phases of the virtual enterprise lifecycle and their
particular people, business and technology issues;
reducing the severities of or finding ways to avoid
single issues as a whole, facilitates configuration,
operation and dissolution of VENs and therewith
increases their economic attractiveness.
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