Introduction to the First Workshop on Collaborative Business Processes (CBP 2007)

Abstract

Recent years have seen the trend of business globalization, which urgently requires dynamic collaboration among organizations. The business processes of different organizations are integrated seamlessly to adapt to the continuously changing business conditions and to stay competitive in the global market. Though current business process technologies have achieved a certain level, there is still a large gap between the current supports and the requirements from real collaboration scenarios. Especially in a loosely coupled collaboration environment, many non-functional yet crucial aspects, such as privacy and security, reliability and flexibility, scalability and agility, process validation, QoS guarantees, etc., are with a great lack of sufficient supports. This gap in turn obstructs the further advancement and wider application of business process technologies. Therefore, more academic research, facilitating infrastructure, protocols and standards are being expected to shift current business process management for supporting collaborative business processes.