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Business process management in open environments remains a stubborn and important challenge. In open environments, autonomous organizations having heterogeneous information systems interact in an ever-evolving manner. The nature of the contractual relationships among such organizations has a significant bearing on the modeling of the business processes in which they participate. Conventional approaches are not suitable for open environments because (1) they lack support for modeling and management of contracts among organizations, (2) the modeling abstractions they offer do not afford crucial software engineering desiderata such as reuse, refinement, aggregation, and verification, and (3) they fail to provide the designers with guidelines on adapting the models should the underlying requirements change.\n\nWe propose a novel approach for engineering interorganizational business interactions. Contractual relationships are modeled via commitments and the interactions for enacting the contracts are captured via the modular abstraction of protocols. Relative to how organizations value the various terms of the contracts and how the contracts are played out via protocols, safety and benefit of the contracts are reasoned about. A protocol specifies rules that govern the interactions among the organizations. Protocols can be published to a repository, shared, reused, refined, and aggregated. We propose a methodology-Amoeba-that guides software designers in the face of evolving requirements on how the protocols and contracts can be adapted.

I can't tell you how many companies I have worked with that have encouraged or tolerated a large degree of geographic dispersal among employees and management teams. "We're virtual, and proud of it," one told me. "It doesn't matter where you live anymore," many employees of virtualized companies have argued. "We travel all the time anyway," has been another frequent mantra.\n\nBut I recently encountered a company that is moving the other way. Eclipsys makes software for healthcare providers. The company's headquarters is in Atlanta. Last week, it changed CEOs. The previous CEO, Andrew Eckert, lived in Silicon Valley. By all accounts, he did a good job in the role, and the company has been doing well. However, the board of directors felt that the company couldn't be managed successfully from afar, and held discussions with Eckert about moving to Atlanta. He was committed for both family and career reasons to stay in California, however, and declined to move. The board decided to change leaders, and Philip Pead, who had previously headed and sold a healthcare software company in Atlanta, got the nod as the new CEO. Pead had moved to Miami, but is returning to Atlanta to run the company.

The "real" Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology or marketing plan, but the reinvention of the enterprise itself. It's a rethinking of the structure, process, culture and even, in some cases, the very purpose of the enterprise. With technology erasing barriers to participation and communication, we're seeing a change in the nature of how we go about running an organization.

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

Technological solutions often only address the symptoms of a problem. Clearly understanding the root causes of the problem and identifying the correct remedies for removing these causes are threfore the mandatory, preliminary steps for choosing the right solution.

Recent events in the news have inspired a thought experiment: I asked myself what I would do if I were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. To be a bit more specific, I imagined that one of the big 3 American auto companies was taken over tomorrow by enlightened and aggressive new leadership whose only goals are to restore the company to operational and financial excellence. This leadership is enlightened (in my book) because it believes firmly in the power of IT to help businesses achieve their goals and differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose (this is a complete fantasy for several reasons, but thought experiments aren't supposed to be constrained by reality.).\nSo what would I propose?

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Collaboration is the participation of independent actors in mutual interactions to deliver a specific result, either chosen or not. The so-called collaboration is the outcome of the interactions that occur, initiated by the different participants for their own good reasons, but collaboration is not the purpose.

In recent posts we've described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it be institutional leaders from above or individuals from below and from the outside of our current institutions?

More than ever, Enterprise 2.0 is the talk of the town. However, the discussion remains difficult due to a continuing bias towards tools and technology. Therefore, an attempt for a real look at the internals of Enterprise 2.0, the dark forces of collaboration.

Collaboration is the participation of independent actors in mutual interactions to deliver a specific result, either chosen or not. The so-called collaboration is the result of the interactions that occur, but collaboration is not the purpose.

Over the past years, the customer has moved to pole position. Customers are no longer passive participants in the sales process but now dictate the rules. Experience creation is the associated buzzword. However, there are also other needs...

In recent posts we've described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it be institutional leaders from above or individuals from below and from the outside of our current institutions?

12 Rules For Bringing 'Social' To Your Business\n\nRarely do I take a negative viewpoint on new developments, especially in technology. But lately, with the seemingly runaway rise of highly successful social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it's become clear that adding the word "social" to virtually any product or service has become the current marketing trend du jour, often to the detriment of the consumers of those offerings.

With Enterprise 2.0, we are trying to solve some of the problems of today's business organisations. However, we must not forget that our business environment is rapidly evolving and therefore, we might be solving the problems of the past instead of those of the future.

"In the past, knowing or finding the right answer was enough to solve a problem. In the future of work, the right answers no longer exist.

While thinking about the concept 'interaction' it is important to understand that the traditional business view and the real world's view on the interaction do not really match. When businesses interact, they want to achieve something. When people interact, they want to understand something.

Let's talk efficiency, let's talk simplicity and leave the big words to others. Bottom line, from all the available pieces of technology on my laptop, nothing -- and I mean nothing -- compares to e-mail. We can reach anyone around the world in a split second, send any file, share ideas and get feedback. E-mail is our way to communicate and work together daily that is always tied to a business process being carried out in the organization. But in all actuality, e-mail is a problem. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions and overload.

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It's one of my favorite events, primarily because so many online friends attend from around the world and I enjoy their company. Despite overwhelming good will among participants, the conference exposed gaps between expectations and reality that continue to plague the Enterprise 2.0 world.

One may as well consider this piece of fact as old news that the general people in China in the present century are getting empowered with better income and better lives every passing year. This has resulted in the millions and millions of citizens to give a shot at all luxuries that the world has in store to offer.