Business process interoperability and collaborative performance measurement

Abstract

In the recent years, inter-organisational cooperation has been one of the organisational strategies most used to compete and become adapted to the exigencies of the global market. In this context, internal business processes of the cooperative enterprises should interact to pursue common objectives that will be profitable for all parts. Therefore, it is necessary to measure the performance of these business processes under a strategic approach and in a twofold manner, from a global perspective (inter-enterprise) and from an individual or partial perspective (intra-enterprise). Performance measurement systems (PMSs) described in the literature that discuss this context are very different in their conception and broadness. This paper describes the basic characteristics that PMSs should fulfil to cover interoperability requirements and a literature review of the PMSs that deal with business process interoperability in order to gain detailed insight into PMS definition for these contexts. From the literature review, a comparison of the PMSs is obtained with regard to eight core characteristics for these contexts: business process representation, business process measurement, business process lifecycle management, PMS intra and interorganisational levels measurement, process-decomposition approach, intra-inter-process connection measurement, interorganisational coordination measurement, and common interorganisational strategy.

Keywords:

• interoperability
• extended business processes
• collaborative performance measurement

Acknowledgements

This work has been developed within the framework of a research project partially funded by FEDER funds and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, entitled ‘Extended Process Interoperability (INPREX)’, reference DPI-2004-02594 and a research project funded by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, entitled ‘Design and Implementation of Performance Measurement Systems within Collaborative Contexts for Aiding the Decision-making Process’, ref PAID-06-08-3206.