WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN
VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE NETWORKS
André Kolell and Jeewani Anupama Ginige
School of Computing & Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta, Australia
Keywords: Business Processes, Business Process Management, Virtual Organizations, Virtual Enterprise Networks,
Workflow Management Systems.
Abstract: Increasing competitive pressure and availability of Internet and related technologies have stimulated the
collaboration of independent businesses. Such collaborations, aimed at achieving common business goals,
are referred to as virtual enterprise networks (VENs). Though web is an excellent platform to collaborate,
the requirements of VENs regarding workflow management systems are in excess those of autonomous
organizations. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of numerous issues related to workflow
managements in VENs. These issues are discussed in the three phases of virtual enterprise lifecycle:
configuration, operation and dissolution; and corroborated by two real case studies of VENs in Australia.
1 INTRODUCTION
The notion of the division of labour to benefit from
productivity improvements is well-known since
Adam Smith published his five books about “The
Wealth of Nations” in 1776. About forty years later,
in 1817, David Ricardo sustained Smith’s rationale
by presenting his idea of comparative cost
advantages in his publication “Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation”. Although the division of
labour is restricted by the extent of the market and
increasing costs of coordination, it is still common
practice for companies to focus on their core
competencies and outsource other activities to
become lean enterprises that are able to reach world
class in their areas.
The invention of the Internet and its related
technologies lowered the barriers for inter-
organizational collaboration. The result was the
emergence of formerly unknown virtual enterprise
networks (VENs), understood as consortiums of
enterprises that strategically join their skills and
resources – supported by computer networks – to
improve their agility and broaden their possibilities
to better react to market developments (Camarinha-
Matos, Afsarmanesh & Rabelo, 2003). Therefore
VENs are highly dynamic organizations that
existence follows the virtual enterprise lifecycle
(Figure 1), consisting of the configuration, operation
and dissolution phases. Some authors suggest a
further subdivision of the configuration phase into
the two phases “partner selection” and “agreements”
(Borchardt, 2006). The “operation” phase is
particularly subdivided into the interactive phases of
“operation” and “evolution” (Camarinha-Matos,
Afsarmanesh & Rabelo, 2003).
Organisations within a VEN need to face
multiple challenges in addition to those that
autonomous organizations do need to deal with.
Configuration Operation Dissolution
Figure 1: Typical phases in the virtual enterprise lifecycle.
Each VEN member has its own aims, core
competencies and resources which might be very
different to those of other members. In addition,
huge spatial distances between the members’ sites
and the VEN’s being a temporary arrangement,
might further increase the complexity. According to
Ricci, Omicini and Denti (2002), a VEN’s
complexity can be reduced by improving
coordination. Borchardt (2006) suggests four
different types of coordination instruments to reduce
complexity: individual-orientated coordination
instruments (selecting an overall coordination
agent), structural coordination instruments (clearly
defining the VEN’s organizational structure),
technocratic coordination instruments (setting up
23
Kolell A. and Ginige J. (2010).
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE NETWORKS.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages 23-31
DOI: 10.5220/0002894200230031
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

clear production plans, agreeing on internal transfer
prices, rules, contracts, etc.) and IT coordination
instruments. Although latter include such
technologies as telephones, fax, e-mail and
video-/online-conferences, the most important IT
coordination instruments are groupware and
workflow management systems.
In the context of VENs, workflow management
systems are a technology that enables virtual
enterprises to manage, coordinate and control their
business activities (Meng, 2002). Workflow
management of VEN is much more complicated
than in autonomous organizations because it is
confronted with all the complexities that VENs need
to face; bringing together all the heterogeneous
software services to achieve the conglomerate’s
original business goal is only one of them.
So far, there are a number of scientific
contributions about how workflow management
systems for a VEN should be. Examples for research
projects in this area are the CrossFlow-project
(Grefen, 1999), the CA-PLAN-project (Yan, 2004)
and the DynaFlow-project (Meng, 2006). All teams
behind these projects identified and tackled the
special challenges a VEN has to face when defining
and implementing a workflow management solution,
but neither have they nor anyone else at any time
really concentrated solely on the issues that occur in
VENs and concern the implementation and usage of
workflow management technology. Although they
mention a selection of issues, they immediately
focus on possible solutions to these issues which
they present in the form of the various projects they
are working on.
It is therefore worthwhile to entirely focus on
workflow management issues that arise in VENs.
This paper will discuss the different issues related to
workflow management in VENs based on the virtual
enterprise lifecycle (Figure 1). These issues will be
subdivided into business, people and technological
issues for discussion purposes. Furthermore a brief
exploration is carried out on how current workflow
management systems and prototypes of research
projects try to overcome these issues.
The organization of this paper is as follows. In
section 2 the research methodology used is
explained, followed by an introduction to the two
case studies used in this research in section 3. In
section 4 the different workflow management issues
in VENs are discussed, under each phase of the
virtual enterprise lifecycle. How current workflow
management systems and prototypes of related
research projects try to handle these issues is
described in section 5. Section 6 positions the
findings of this paper among the similar work
carried out by other researchers. Section 7 concludes
the paper with a brief view at the possible areas for
further research.
2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The findings of this work result from two case
studies and a comprehensive literature review. Two
case studies selected for this paper are based on one
of the author’s involvement in them. In one case, the
author was involved in the capacity of an employee
of the VEN and as a technology provider in the
other. Non formal interviews were used as the main
technique of collecting case study related
information.
In addition, to these case studies a thorough
literature review was carried out. This literature
review enabled establishing our own findings from
the case studies.
During the course of the research, identified
issues of VEN (either from the case study or through
literature review) were allocated to the different
phases of the virtual enterprise lifecycle, based on
their occurrences. This representation gives a well-
structured overview of all the issues in their
respective phases of the virtual enterprise lifecycle.
3 CASE STUDIES
In Australia, the Western Sydney Region is
considered to be the homeland for micro businesses
and small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Over
72,000 micro businesses and SMEs in the region
contribute to 10% of the Australian economy
(Ginige, Murugesan & Kazanis, 2001). Due to this
high number of relatively smaller companies, there
are definite advantages in terms of employment and
economic development. However, being smaller
organisations they face other limitations too. One
such limitation is their inability to compete in the
global market for reasonably larger contracts.
Therefore, many SMEs in this region attempt to join
forces by forming VENs.
To disclose the various issues that can occur in
VENs, two such VENs from Western Sydney region
are selected. The first case study is about a group of
tool making companies, who attempted to benefit by
forming a VEN for the purpose of quoting for bigger
jobs. The second is in relation to a virtual consulting
company that brought together medical practitioners
ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
24

and information and communication technology
experts to join their expertise in providing software
solutions for the healthcare sector.
An overview of the case studies is presented
below. These case studies will be utilised in the
latter discussions of this paper.
3.1 Tool Makers
Tool Makers are companies that develop instruments
(or tools), for other mass scale manufacturing
organisations such as plastic moulding companies,
or individuals like inventors. Such four tool making
companies in the Western Sydney region decided to
join forces in 2004.
Tool makers were thriving micro businesses in
the 90’s, prior to Australian jobs started being
shipped to offshore places like China. The
workshops of these companies are equipped with
machineries of varying capacities. In the new
millennium, due to lack of work that suited the
capacity of these workshops, they idle. On the other
hand, they were not able to bid for bigger global jobs
such as parts of aircraft manufacturing, individually,
due to lack of capacity in individual workshops.
Hence four companies decided to form one VEN to
be able to quote for bigger contracts, by showcasing
their joint workshop capabilities. One particular
tender that they aimed bid for was for manufacturing
a certain part of Boeing aircrafts.
The joining of forces was expected to be
achieved as a VEN, using a web-based collaborative
quoting system. The idea was to have a web-based
workflow management system that would allow
these companies to enter jobs details, jointly design
the jobs, share design details, divide the activities
among the four companies based on the capacity,
and jointly offer quotes to the customer.
A software development team in the AeIMS
(Advanced enterprise Information Management
System) research group of University of Western
Sydney was given the task of developing suitable
software for the purpose of collaborative quoting.
AeIMS started the initial developments in late 2004
in consultation with the companies.
Even though these four companies were very
enthused about the idea of becoming a VEN, even
by late 2005 they were not possible to lift-off as one
entity. Then eventually by 2006 they decided to let
go the efforts of becoming a single VEN.
This case study provides the classic situation of
VEN not being able to become a reality, due to the
issues that they face in the configuration stage of the
lifecycle. Particular, issues that affected these four
companies will be further discussed in the latter
parts of this paper.
3.2 Collaborative Consultation
In contrast to the first case study, the second was a
success, as it managed to cover the full lifecycle of
the VEN from configuration, through operation to
dissolution. This collaboration was between medical
practitioners and experts in information and
communication technology. A few micro consulting
companies based in Western Sydney region of
Australia decided to join as a VEN in 2005 to
provide consulting services to the healthcare sector.
This virtual consulting enterprise had a different
approach and format to the prior.
At the configuration stage, these individual
companies had identified their strengths and
weaknesses in terms of their skill sets, expertise,
associations in professional networks, available
technologies and other operational needs such as
specific insurance policies they held and location.
While they operated as individual companies, they
came together as one VEN when they found possible
consulting work.
Based on the project they would select a
champion among themselves to lead the way and
other members who would participate in that
particular tender. In making these decisions, they
would consider the tender specifications and
strengths and weaknesses of individual consulting
companies. The selected champion company would
coordinate the activities and would see through to
the end of the project. After the completion of the
project, the VEN would temporarily dissolute until a
new project comes along.
This project based formation of VEN, has
worked extremely well for these consulting
companies. Even to date they continue to form into a
VEN quickly for consulting projects and dissolute it
at the end of the project.
The success of being able to operate as a VEN
does not guarantee that they operate without any
problems. The issues that this VEN faces will be
discussed later in this paper.
4 WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
ISSUES IN VIRTUAL
ENTERPRISE NETWORKS
VENs have to face multiple kinds of challenges du-
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE NETWORKS
25

ring their existence. While some of them are general,
for example the selection of partners, establishing
trust, agreeing on sharing of revenues/losses, the
duration of the network and how to dissolve the
network; other challenges are unambiguously related
to the VEN’s information technology infrastructure.
Camarinha-Matos, Tschammer and Afsarmanesh
(2004) and Camarinha-Matos (2005) point out that
the very short lifecycles of modern technologies and
the lack of technology-independent reference
architectures are the main obstacles to quickly and
easily set up a VEN from an information technology
point of view. They explain how service orientated
architectures can help to reduce the problems that
arise from heterogeneous software systems. Thus
inter-organizational workflow management systems
need to be implemented upon (and to some extent
independently from) the underlying information
technology infrastructures to automate, manage,
coordinate and control the business activities of the
network (Meng, 2002).
Figure 2 depicts the occurrence of the various
workflow management related issues during the
virtual enterprise lifecycle. These issues are further
categorised as people, business and technological
issues. The subsequent sections of this paper
describe these issues in detail.
4.1 Issues in the Configuration Phase
The configuration phase of the virtual enterprise
lifecycle is where most issues occur. This is mainly
caused by the requirement to agree and set up the
network’s information technology infrastructure.
As soon as the initial partner selection is done, a
VEN coordinator needs to be chosen. This can be
either a member of the VEN or an independent
instance that is entirely newly established. The
coordinator is responsible for ensuring successful
coordination of the VEN’s business activities.
In our first case study, one of the reasons for
their failure was their inability to select a suitable
coordinator. There were certain amounts of trust
issues involved leading into certain business matters
such as in the division of jobs and handling of funds.
Some members owned workshop capabilities that
were superior to others; hence they expected to be
the coordinator of jobs. However, the others argued
that whoever brings the project work should be able
to be the coordinator of the activities. Due to these
differences in opinion the VEN did not manage to
select a suitable coordinator.
In the second case study, the selection of the
coordinator was project based. Also they had
devised successful assessing criteria in selecting a
coordinator based on strengths and weaknesses of
members and project specifications. Members had
the understanding that they may or may not be
involved in certain projects, because the rules were
laid very clearly at the beginning.
Once the coordinator is identified, the business
processes of the VEN need to be defined. For the
definition of the processes, it is important to
understand the role of each member of the VEN and
what they bring into the collaboration.
In our first case study, defining the business
processes was chaotic as the tool makers did not
have a clear understanding of the contributions of
the different members. In contrast, the definition of
business processes in the second case study was
relatively easy as they accurately had identified the
strengths and weaknesses of each member and also
their contributions to each project.
The members of the VEN must agree on the
information technology they want to use and how
interoperability of heterogeneous software systems
can be guaranteed. Furthermore, a workflow
management system must be chosen, that is able to
integrate multiple distributed heterogeneous
software systems. The translation of the VEN’s
strategy – meaning its long-term goals – into
business processes and the evaluation of their
automation is an indispensable prerequisite for this
step of the VEN’s configuration.
Since all members of the VEN are usually
autonomous companies who existed before the
collaboration was founded and who aim to exist
after the VEN dissolves, they have their own
interests and might compete with each other in other
business areas. It is therefore – in contrast to an
autonomous enterprise – necessary, that both the
workflow management system and the single
enterprise’s software systems limit the access to
software services and data to those partners who
really require access to them. Of course, the
openness of the VEN’s members is a trade-off
between offering useful information that helps to
increase the network’s overall success and
disclosing a corporate’s secrets, widening the
member’s window of vulnerability (Frenkel, 2000).
In our first case study, the decision of selecting
an appropriate workflow management system was
outsourced to an external entity that all parties
trusted. Hence the decision to develop a web-based
collaborative quoting system was fully supported by
all the tool maker companies. However, issues arose
when deciding about data access rights and
archiving. While everyone understood the
importance of sharing information, they had issues
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26

Configuration Operation Dissolution
AgreeonVENCoordinator
AgreeonWfMS(Architecture)
Implementthe
designedSolution
DefineBusinessProcesses
basedonlong‐termGoals
DefineInterfaces
ImplementActivityTrackingandTracing
Establish,KeepandImproveTrust
UseTrusttoincreaseTransparencyandAgilityanddecreaseTransactionCosts
BuilduptheAbilitytoCopewith
leaving(andnew)VENMembers
(HandlethePotentialLossofData,
Interfaces,Services,etc.)
MaintainProcessessuchas
CustomerSupportorProduct
Maintance
Ensureon‐goingAccesstorelevantData
(e.g.Customers,Orders,etc.)
PeopleIssues BusinessIssues TechnologicalIssues
Process‐MonitoringandProgress‐Reporting
CorrectiveActions
DefineDataAccessRights
ExternalTrigger
OnboardingofnewVENMembers
CompensationofleavingVENMembers

Figure 2: Occurrences of Issues of Virtual Enterprises in Various Phases of the Lifecycle.
in sharing certain design details via engineering
drawings. Sometimes, their clients did not want
information to be disclosed to other parties. Again it
came down to the trust issues that prohibited these
tool maker companies from resolving the data access
issues.
The consulting company of our second case
study had different needs in terms of information
technology. The nature of their work did not require
special information technologies, except for some
project management tools, which were available to
everyone. Hence the coordinator of a particular
project would keep track of project participation,
timelines, and other project related documents. At
the end of the project the coordinating company
would archive the information and provide a copy of
this archived information to the other parties that
were involved in the project. Also since these
experts came from different domains, their
individual client bases were more or less mutually
exclusive and they had no issues about the
intellectual property. Also over a period of time they
have developed a certain amount of trust among
themselves that now helps in current operations.
Another issue workflow management systems
need to deal with is the proper tracking and tracing
of the activities every single member contributes to
the final product or service. While this is required by
law in some countries it is also useful for identifying
errors and continuous quality improvements.
In both of our case studies the members
identified the need for keeping accurate records of
tracking and monitoring activities. The tool makers’
web-based quoting system had the capabilities for
each member to report their progress via the system
and also to re-distribute work if one member was
unable to meet targets due to any reason.
The companies involved in the second case study
took rather a lose approach in keeping track of
progress. Each member would email the coordinator
their progress and the coordinator would keep a
record of the progress of the project locally. The
other members trusted the project management
capabilities of the coordinating member to resolve
any timeline or resource problems.
Camarinha-Matos et al. (2003) point out, that the
configuration efforts are always the largest for an
organization when it participates for the first time in
a VEN. This claim is further confirmed by our first
case study. Based on the experience of the two case
studies, it is conclusive that people issues - mainly
trust - are the main factor that needs to be resolved at
the configuration stage. It is also evident from our
case studies that it is much easier for organisations
to resolve trust issues, when they come from
different domains where they do not claim to have a
common client base.
4.2 Issues in the Operation Phase
The workflow management issues that occur in the
operation phase of a VEN concern improvements in
flexibility and collaboration. Our second case study
will be extensively used to demonstrate the issues
involved at this stage.
Flexibility is one of the key factors needed at the
operational stage of the VEN. In particular external
triggers may lead to the introduction of new
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE NETWORKS
27

members to the network or the departure of existing
members. External triggers such as needing new
skills that did not exist within the network would
result in getting new members. Also due to various
business and people reasons, members may decide
to totally leave or withdraw their contributions to the
VEN. Without being highly flexible in its business
processes and the technologies for their execution;
the VEN is unable to compensate the exit of one of
its members in a reasonable amount of time. The
requirements of VENs regarding workflow
management systems therefore excess those of
autonomous organizations.
The immediate effects of member changes are
the business impact that it has on the running
projects. In particular when members leave, the
remaining workload needs to be shared among the
existing members and projects plans need to be
redrawn. Sometimes, new members need to be
added to the network.
Followed by the business issues, technological
implications are faced by the VEN. For example the
systems must allow easily changing the setup of the
organizational structure of the network; including
the workflows and the visibility of and access to data
related to it. In addition, the possibility of losing data
and single activities within workflows must be
considered: It must be prevented that the exit of a
member results in the breakdown of operations;
meaning that started workflows – for example
accepted orders – can no longer be processed due to
essential information that left with the exiting
member.
In our second case study, agility was one of the
key foundations that the VEN was built upon. From
the accounts and financial point of view the
coordinating company sub-contracted the work of
the other members. Hence the operational point of
leaving or addition of members was handled in a
smooth manner. However, the issues were there
when data get lost when members leave, as they do
not have had a centralised mechanism to collect
information. It was up to the project coordinating
organisation to make sure the leaving member
provided all the information they possessed to the
other members. This totally worked on the trust
established and a certain amount of risk was taken
by all members in relation to this.
Furthermore workflow management systems do
need to support the continuous optimization of the
VEN’s workflows. In this context, the coordinating
instance of the VEN needs to monitor the
performance of workflow execution and report
relevant findings to single members.
The consulting enterprise of our second case
study improved its processes based on the
experience that they gained from their past projects.
For example, they switched from hiring individuals
for which they did not have staff for to registered
companies only to solve issues in paying salaries,
taxes and superannuation.
Our investigation shows that flexibility and
operational work structure, supported by sound
information systems, are the key ingredients needed
in managing issues in the operational stage. Also the
ability for VEN to learn from past experiences and
improve their business processes is equally
important.
4.3 Issues in the Dissolution Phase
The dissolution of a VEN does not automatically
brush aside any workflow management issues.
Instead the opposite is the case. Some business
processes – such as customer support or product
maintenance – must be kept alive although the
organization itself dissolved. Even if it does not
make sense to provide such services (processes) for
the whole lifecycle of the product or service
generated by the virtual enterprise, contracts or law
might require this for at least a given period of time.
Workflow management systems for VEN must
therefore be able to deal with this issue – which is
again one that emphasizes the requirement of high
flexibility – as well. The workflow management
system must be flexible enough to overcome the
possible loss of data that is only being provided by a
single member. Furthermore it must allow regulating
access to all the different information according to
the regulations the VEN’s members had agreed on
when they created their network.
The VEN related to our second case study
handles dissolution issues by providing the
collective knowledge to all the members who were
involved in a particular project. Thus no one
company had the responsibility of managing such
information.
As highlighted by the VEN members of the
second case study, the most important aspect of
smooth dissolution is firstly identifying the
dissolution point at the initial configuration of the
VEN. In their case, once every consultation project
is completed and final payments are done the VEN
dissolves. If there is no such clear identification of
the dissolution point it can lead into issues. This
dissolution points need to be quantifiable and
practical. When reflecting back, it is clear that our
ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
28

tool makers of the first case study had issues in
deciding this dissolution points.
At the early stages of the lifecycle our second
case study’s VEN prepares a set of guidelines that
involve the activities at the dissolution stage. These
guidelines provide details of responsibilities of each
member of the activities at dissolution, such as
providing continues support, finalising financial
matters, archiving and distributing information, etc.
Our study revealed that smooth dissolution
mainly depends on proper planning at the early
stages and support of the information systems that
continue to provide necessary information beyond
the dissolution for the required parties.
5 ISSUE HANDLING BY
CURRENT WORKFLOW
MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS
The increasing number of workflow management
systems makes it nearly impossible to keep an
overview of their functionalities. Therefore it is not
the aim of this paper to provide a comprehensive
overview of how different workflow management
systems deal with the issues of VENs. Instead it will
only be shown how some systems, especially those
that result from research projects related to
workflow management in VENs, have improved
their architectures and functionalities in order to
fulfil the special requirements that emerged from the
organizational form of VENs.
Some of these scientific workflow management
systems or approaches to workflow management in
virtual enterprises are PRODNET I and II, SSPS,
CrossFlow, DynaFlow and CA-PLAN. A real-life
example of a workflow management system that is
specialized in inter-organizational collaboration –
with a focus on order processing and project
execution – is myOpenFactory.
The approaches of all those systems to improve
inter-organizational collaboration are quite different.
Systems like CrossFlow and CA-PLAN create
interoperability between the member’s individual
workflow systems by treating them as services and
integrating them through the usage of newly
proposed workflow models. Thus inter-
organizational service orientated architectures can be
set up, with a coordinating instance at its top (Yan,
2004; Grefen, 1999). Ricci et al. (2002) describe that
in an optimal case the role of the coordinating
instance can be filled out by a software solution.
Other systems, such as DynaFlow, expand the scope
of the workflow process description language
(WPDL) to respond to virtual enterprise’s
requirements without trying to introduce entirely
new standards but instead building up on existing
ones (Meng, 2006). This is reasonable because it
does not constrain the development of standardized
base information architecture for the collaboration of
networked organizations. Camarinha-Matos,
Tschammer and Afsarmanesh (2004) point out, that
the currently on-going standardization efforts in the
area of Internet-related technologies would pave the
way for the development of such a base
infrastructure. In this context, the work of the
workflow management coalition (WfMC) is
mentionable. Amongst other working groups they
have one working group that is especially focusing
on improving the interoperability of workflows.
Further improvements of the WfMC’s standards are
desirable not only because of making inter-
organizational collaboration theoretically easier but
also because of the popularity of their standards in
general, thus ensuring a quick spread and avoiding
the emergence of other standards and technologies at
the same time.
6 SIMILAR WORK
As there are already a lot of publications about
VENs and workflow management, this paper can be
placed into a broad context of related work. But, as
mentioned previously, there are no scientific
contributions that entirely focus on the issues related
to workflow management in VENs.
To begin with, there are publications that
investigate the phenomenon of VENs in general and
present their general issues, most often including
possible solutions. First of all it is worth mentioning
Camarinha-Matos et al. (2003), who describe
general challenges which occur during the different
phases of the virtual enterprise lifecycle and which
constrain the network from achieving its optimal
agility. Further examples in this area of research are
Ricci et al. (2002), Institut der Wirtschaft
Thüringens (2005) and Borchardt (2006). A
comprehensive overview of technical and non-
technical issues in cross-organizational and cross-
border IS/IT collaboration is provided by
Madlberger and Roztocki (2007), who have
conducted a literature review of 52 research papers,
published from 2000 to 2007.
Then there are publications that concentrate on
the information technology infrastructure of VENs.
Camarinha-Matos, Afsarmanesh et al. published
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE NETWORKS
29

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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