The waasabe model: Marrying waas and business-entities to support cross-organization collaboration

With a growing services-based focus in enterprises, functionally-tiered organizational structures have emerged. Synchronizing among the tiers is difficult due to differing concerns and vocabularies, especially when cross-enterprise collaboration is involved. Furthermore, deficiencies in work handoff among different roles and parties also occur within tiers. Building on the notions of work-as-a-service for work execution and business entities in operations, this paper proposes the WaaSaBE model as a boundary object for integrated management across and within tiers and across enterprises. We describe the framework, a formal model arising from the framework, and its basic instantiation for a given problem domain. © 2012 IEEE.