Collaborative business process engineering (CBPE) across multiple organisations

This research is an investigation into how organisations can engineer new collaborative business processes. This engineering of processes is based on technical advances, which enables organisations to enhance their communication and collaboration with their customer and each other. This research identifies how advanced technologies can be properly applied to create collaborative business processes of within and across organisations. This research has enabled this collaboration and extended its boundaries to facilitate dynamic collaborations amongst multiple organisations that may not necessarily be known to each other. The new model of collaboration achieves the recommended collaborative environment by restructuring the business processes for Web-based applications. This thesis also validates the proposed model for the collaboration in a global environment. This creation and validation of the model satisfies the requirements of a PhD-level research. The concept of Collaborative Business Process Engineering (CBPE) is unique in that it describes how cluster-based processes of multiple organisations can be engineered. Furthermore, this research also integrates the existing concepts of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and Business Process Management (BPM) in the model. CPBE is able to evaluate the impact of the interoperability of the organisations on their engineered business processes as well as their business structures. This research further demonstrates the implementation of CBPE in a proposed Collaborative Web-Based System (CWBS). This thesis discusses how the Web Services (WS) and mobile technologies, specifically Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), influence the interoperation amongst multiple organisations. The impact of the WS on engineered business processes and the extension of this impact on multiple organisations and their clusters are included in this research. This thesis also describes the existing model of collaboration and provides a literature review to support the need for the proposed model of collaboration. Existing technologies for the engineering of the new collaborative business processes are explained. Detailed descriptions of the research methodologies (quantitative and qualitative), philosophies (interpretivist and constructivist) and theories (evolutionary and socio-technical) used are identified and described here. The dynamic aspects of collaboration in the proposed new model of collaboration, wherein organisations can enter and exit the collaboration at will are discussed. The thesis also discusses the factors influencing the collaboration, such as trust, security, confidence level and the availability of the channels for collaboration. The dynamic aspects of the proposed model are tested against the static aspects of the current model wherein the collaborating organisations need to set up prior contract before collaboration. A part of this study deals with evaluation of the significance of the CBPE for the organisations that adapt technologies such as Web Service and mobility. Finally, this thesis demonstrates an investigation in the impact of interoperability emanating from emerging technologies, specifically the Web Services technology, on organisations by providing a model as well as conceptual implementations. The proposed model of CBPE and the conceptual implementations facilitate the use of the emerging technologies for effective collaborations. These emerging technologies are presented and described in Chapter 2 while their impacts on the proposed model of CBPE are explained in Chapter 4. The proposed model in this thesis enables numerous businesses to collaborate electronically thereby producing dynamically collaborating groups/clusters. This thesis presents the modelling, understanding of collaborative business process that transcend the organisational boundaries, factors that influence collaborative business processes and the entry and exit criteria for these collaborative organisations