A Methodological Approach to Enable Cooperative Business Process Design through Web Services

Web services are rapidly becoming the key technology for enterprises to enable IT development and modernization. By now, organizations have experienced the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology by developing and using simple internal applications or by searching for information provided by external services, thus enabling the interactions among different organizations. SOA is also an appropriate platform-independent approach to implement cooperative business processes. In this scenario, the service is a unit of work provided by a service provider and offered to the other organizations involved in a common network. In order to share services and knowledge, organizations have to standardize their own process descriptions and model them through services using the same approach and principles. The paper proposes a methodology to support the designer in the identification of services to produce by considering the initial process flow. The adoption of the presented approach would guarantee a homogenous description of services and their interaction along the enterprise network and thus facilitate the collaboration.