Transforming Cross-Organizational Business Processes into Service-Oriented Architectures: Method and Application in the Automotive Industry

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) promise flexible process integration in heterogeneous environments. Since services encapsulate application functionality according to business processes, the understanding of processes is a prerequisite for implementing an SOA. Existing SOA development approaches tend to focus on enterprise application integration scenarios rather than on business-to-business scenarios. Due to the increasing heterogeneity of applications in an inter-organizational context, significant benefits can be expected when implementing SOAs for business-to-business integration. However, a systematic approach to analyzing inter-organizational business processes and transforming them into SOAs is still missing. This paper presents a method for modeling inter-organizational processes and deriving business services in three steps. The applicability of this method is shown for a specific business-to-business scenario in the automotive industry.