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To survive in a competitive business world, a company needs as much help as it can get. Collaboration and the use of provided services is nothing new. Customers in today's world have an array of services supporting their business from which to choose. Cloud services transform the way many organizations work. They offer significant benefit for operation management and service computing (Chang 2013). To take advantage of these benefits the encouragement of process improvement and the assurance that processes do meet all compliance and risk regulations is of core business interest. In addition, customers increasingly want to get their products and services sooner, better, cheaper and in a more innovative and up-to-date way. This is due to the continually change of demands and expectations so that the need to be dynamic in provisioning products and services in the most efficient and effective manner through continuously improving processes rises. The important question there is: where do cloud services fit or not fit into the traditional set of services?
Process improvement is one of the ways addressing the challenges of increasing in regards to effectiveness, efficiency, capacity, flexibility and responsiveness (Chang, Walters & Wills 2014). More recently, a new generation of collaborative tools evolved which support coordination of activities via a web based service. What is relatively new is the use of software systems to support the collaboration of business processes to facilitate new forms of collaboration. One major product emergence is the entire cloud service model as innovation and collaboration, which will frame the future of the cloud agenda. (Forrester, 2012) Due to this technological evolution, it becomes increasingly easier for companies to cultivate and orchestrate collaborative ecosystems around the cloud services. Whereas previously the data in IT systems largely stayed locked up behind corporate firewalls, more and more of these data is now flying in and out of a cloud. This digitization is transformative, driving business processes to ever-greater power and efficiency. However, standardization is still and even more a key success factor that allows the digitization of business networks to expand and flourish. The business processes and related business parties with their interaction, such as suppliers, distributors, customers, partners, and employees form increasingly complex and dynamic system, which stays as the most important factor of any competitive advantage.
Business processes are paramount for the success of a company towards its competitors in the market. Companies have always been working on improving processes for millennia. One can say that the systematic efforts at business process improvement started with Michael Hammer and James Champy in 1993 where they argued, among other things, that IT had often been used to automate bad processes and proposed that the proper combination of process redesign and IT could revolutionize the way companies worked.