The CEC-PAW workshop, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC), explores the application of service oriented concepts to the management and coordination of people and work as they collaborate towards a common goal in a dynamic ecosystem of partners, providers, and suppliers. Globalization, specialization, and rapid innovation are changing many aspects of both business and its operations. Many large organizations that were once self-sufficient and that could dictate processes to their service providers and suppliers are now finding this model unsustainable. To remain competitive and differentiate through innovation they must now collaborate as peers with specialized partners, service providers, and suppliers. Due to this increased complexity overall project failures, uncontrollable delays, and significant financial losses have been observed in many areas, such as global service delivery or the development of next generation passenger airplanes. This indicates the importance of finding new ways to support cross-enterprise work, conceptually calling for a framework that will support a dynamic “plug and play” modularity of organizations in their different roles.

Many factors contribute to the intricacy of the problem of cross-enterprise collaboration, including internal interdependency/complexity, external unpredictability, conflicts of interest, errors/faults, trust, reputation, conflict resolution, orderly rollbacks and termination of collaboration. Current approaches, including Service Oriented Computing (SOC), Business Process Management (BPM), Command and Control (C2), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Linguistics, and Crowdsourcing, vary widely and address different aspects of the problem. Cohesive and comprehensive research relating these together and treating the problem in its totality remains to be done.

There is growing awareness that the next quantum leap in IT will be the application of Service Oriented concepts to optimize how people do work in globally distributed ecosystems. Principled methods to coordinate and optimize collaborative work across enterprise boundaries have the potential to strongly impact business and society.