An analysis of web services support for dynamic business process outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. In fast changing markets, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way. This requires automated means for the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships. Due to wide industry support and their model of loose coupling, Web Services have become the mechanism of choice to interconnect organizations. This paper analyzes Web Services support for the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract-based outsourcing to define requirements, introduce the Web Services framework and investigate the match between the two. We observe that the framework requires further support for cross-organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and transaction management. We suggest an approach to fill these gaps based on a business process support application layer implemented on Web Service technology. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.