Designing workflow views with flows for large-scale business-to-business information systems

Workflow technology has recently been employed as a framework for implementing large-scale business-to-business (B2B) information systems over the Internet. This typically requires collaborative enactment of complex workflows across multiple organizations. To tackle the complex of these cross-organizational interactions, we propose a methodology to break down workflow requirements into five types of elementary flows: control, data, semantics, exception, and security flows. Then, we can determine the subset of each of five types of flows necessary for the interactions with each type of business partners. These five subsets, namely, flow views, constitute a workflow view, based on which interactions can be systematically designed and managed. We further illustrate how these flows can be implemented with various contemporary Web services standard technologies.