Deriving service models in cross-organizational workflows

Competitive markets force companies to form virtual enterprises by outsourcing activities to external service providers. The workflow concept has been very successful in streamlining business processes by automating the coordination of activities, but has so far been limited to use within single organizations. To address the problems of cross-organizational workflows, we use a service-oriented workflow model. Within this approach, we present a technique to derive a model of the external services, based on continuous-time Markov chains, by analysing their externally observable behaviour. This allows one to assess the quality of the external services without compromising the autonomy of the service providers.