Can Existing Approaches Manage Dynamic and Large Business Processes enacted through Systems-of-Systems?

Abstract: In the era of joint ventures (JV) and mergers & acquisitions (M&A), dynamic and large business processes can emerge to achieve broader business goals and are often formed from business processes of distinct organizations. Software systems of such distinct organizations should support these larger processes and, for this, they need to communicate among them forming the so called Systems-of-Systems (SoS). However, the management of these larger processes and the correspondent SoS has been currently a complicated challenge for the alliances of organizations. In this scenario, the main contribution of this paper is to discover what has been proposed in the literature to manage these processes. We analyzed possibly all existing approaches and the findings point out that many of them cannot provide understanding of the whole large processes and, more importantly, they do not address completely the SoS inherent characteristics. We also highlight the next research directions to make possible the management of these dynamic, complex, interconnected business processes that have increasingly crossed several critical domains.