A systematic approach for business service consolidation in virtual organizations

Abstract

Various forms of partnerships have increasingly emerged among organizations, in both the manufacturing and service industry. In one type of structured partnership, called the Virtual Organization (VO), the member organizations share with each other a part of their capacities and capabilities, so that together they can seize a bigger market share and more opportunities. However, to excel the VO's potential, the participating organizations must become fully informed about each other's particular abilities and competencies, as represented by their shared business services (BSs). Our approach proposes the creation of a common shared pool of integrated BSs, and further optimizing it through consolidating similar and related BSs, to reduce the size of this shared pool and enhance its learning curve by the VO partners. To this end, we extend and adapt a Business Process merge technique to make it more suitable to BS consolidation and VO applicability. In this paper, a semiautomated methodology is introduced that creates an optimized, clean (i.e., anomaly-free consolidated model), and valid (i.e., approved by domain experts) set of consolidated BSs in the VO context. Design science principles are applied to this research, and a systematic literature review is also performed. Furthermore, a real case study from the construction industry is conducted to validate the introduced methodology.