What is Relative Workflow

This chapter introduces a service oriented relative workflow model as a means of helping organisations promptly create flexible and privacy-safe virtual organisation alliances. It argues that virtual organisation alliances are highly advocated to adapt to dynamic B2B collaborations, driven by the fast changing service demand-and-supply requirements. However, the temporary partnership and low trustiness between collaborating organisations put challenges to effectively manage collaborative business processes, and correspondingly an organisation centred design method and a visibility mechanism are discussed in this chapter to provide a finer granularity of authority control at contacting and collaboration design phases. Furthermore, the authors hope that understanding the establishment of a virtual organisation alliance through the use of relative workflows will not only inform researchers a better business process design methodology, but also assist in the understanding of the dynamic behaviours inside a virtual organisation alliance and the supporting approaches.