Second International Workshop on Cross Enterprise Collaboration (CEC)

 

 

CEC'11

 

BPM'11

 

 

Second International Workshop on Cross Enterprise Collaboration (CEC)

 

 

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Business collaboration takes place in a context that must be mutually comprehended between service consumers and providers to avoid catastrophic misunderstandings, e.g., confusing the semantics of measurement units that result in devastating machine-construction mistakes for satellites. Thus, clarity must exist about a shared ontology/set of terminology/data quality. Methods and CSCW systems should aid an efficient and effective context-clarification process for ontology/ terminology/data quality.

Once a mutually comprehended cooperation context is established, an embedded collaboration structure should emerge and rolled out. That collaboration structure may span a spectrum from rather loose coordination with a high degree of notation ambiguity to the other extreme of very structured and semantically very deterministic notation. Thus, the distributed collaboration models may have layers with several dimensions, e.g., highly unstructured and ambiguous to very deterministic and structured. Additionally, these processes reside on external or in-house locations but relate to each other cross-organizationally.

The context-embedded, distributed collaboration structure is part of a (cloud-computing) ecosystem that enables a lifecycle management of electronic communities of either master/servant(s) and/or peer-to-peer business collaboration. The lifecycle of an electronic community starts with an inception stemming from a breeding infrastructure that leads to a collaboration-contract agreement, reaches past the the dynamic establishment of a distributed collaboration governance infrastructure (CFI), and culminates in a technology-driven service and protocol population of that CFI for enactment.

Agility addresses the reaction to disruptive, context-altering events that require instantaneous reaction by the collaboration configuration. I.e., such events must be caught to trigger a reconciliation process back to the point of mutually comprehended collaboration contexts (update ontology/terminology/data). The changes stemming from the reconciled collaboration context must then cascade down to update the stacked layers of nested cross-organizational collaboration structures. Likewise, it is possible that changes in collaboration structure may cascade upstream to the context level where mutual comprehension is goes through an adaptation process. The underlying ecosystem infrastructure supports such top down/bottom up adaptations.