Modelling inter-organizational processes with process model fragments

Today most of the workflow management approaches focus on centralized business processes that are being carried out within one orgaization.However, business practice demand that more and more inter-organizational processes have to be considered. Therefore we developed an approach for a decentralized process management basing on the concept of process model fragments. The goal of the approach is especially to consider the autonomicy of the organizations that participate in inter-organizational processes. A process model fragment is related to an organization and describes the part of the process the organization (resp. its human agents) is responsible for. By interconnecting process model fragments the information exchange between the organizations is described. The concept that is proposed in this paper is generic an can be adopted to many workflow management approaches