An evaluation and decision method for ICT architectures for cross-organizational business process coordination

Abstract

Our work aims at providing support for the decision-making processes involved in the model-driven development of information technology (IT) solutions for cross-organizational business process (CBP) coordination and automation. The objective of the work described in this paper is to provide enterprise IT architects with an evaluation and decision model that enables the principled assessment and selection of an effective IT architecture paradigm (e.g. central broker, federated brokers, peer-to-peer) for a given cross-organizational business process coordination task. Our approach follows the principles of design science; the contribution of this paper is threefold: First, we present three common architectural patterns for (service-oriented) CBP coordination. Second, the core contribution is established by a new method for decision support suitable for IT architects to derive and evaluate an appropriate architecture paradigm for a given use case or application domain. The method is accompanied by a set of representative scenario descriptions that allow the evaluation and selection of appropriate IT system coordination architecture paradigms for CBP enactment, as well as a set of guidelines for how different contingencies influence IT system coordination architecture.

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