Abstract
A big challenge for governments from all over the world is to improve the service provisioning to their clients, citizens, and businesses. This is partly motivated by the aim to reduce the administrative burdens for citizens and businesses (e.g., Dutch Government, 2003, 2004), but also demanded by its clients, who expect the public sector to increase its attention on customer service just as businesses have done as a result of the rise of Internet technologies (Donnelly, Wisniewski, Dalrymple, & Curry, 1995; McIvor, McHugh, & Cadden, 2002). Due to the fragmented nature of governments (Wimmer, 2002), the activities that make up the service-delivery processes of many governmental services are often performed by different governmental agencies (Castellano, Pastore, Arcieri, & Summo, 2004; Contenti, Termini, Mecella, & Baldoni, 2003; Gortmaker & Janssen, 2004). Managing these service-delivery processes that span multiple agencies requires adequate coordination between the different subprocesses and different agencies. The trend of moving toward electronic service delivery makes the need of coordinating cross-agency service-delivery processes even more apparent, as citizens and business expect fast responses and customer-centric service provisioning. A complication is that information systems are also largely fragmented, which gives rise to a whole new range of coordination issues that need to be solved. A promising technology that offers many advantages to the problem of automating cross-agency processes is Web service orchestration (Gortmaker, Janssen, & Wagenaar, 2004). However, there is a lack of experience reports, literature, and case studies concerning the potential of Web service orchestration (van Hillegersberg, Boeke, & van den Heuvel, 2004). Moreover, orchestration should be viewed on at least two different levels: on a technical, and an organizational level (Gortmaker & Janssen, 2004). On a technical level, Web-service orchestration makes use of the potential of Web-service technology to orchestrate different Web services into one overall service-delivery process. On an organizational level, orchestration can be viewed as performing process orchestrator roles aimed at managing the interdependencies between various subprocesses performed by multiple agencies. This article investigates research issues concerning the application of Web-service orchestration technology and process orchestrator roles for coordinating cross-agency business processes. These research issues need to be resolved in order to be able to use process orchestrators in an efficient and effective way to coordinate governmental cross-agency service-delivery processes. First, we present the background of both Web-service orchestration and process orchestrators. Thereafter, we investigate a case study and use this case study to demonstrate the research issues that should be addressed for automating cross-agency processes using Web-service orchestration and process orchestrators. Finally, further trends are presented and conclusions are drawn.