Managing Changes in Service Oriented Virtual Organizations: A Structural and Procedural Framework to Facilitate the Process of Change

Virtual Organizations in a dynamic environment need efficient methods of change management to initiate changes to partners' services. In this paper, the authors present a structural and a procedural framework for change management in Service-Oriented Virtual Organizations. The structural framework categorizes changes into three layers of change and identifies triggers of changes. The procedural framework incorporates various components including the six layers of change processes, change control, change actors, and related management processes. A prototype with different scenarios of change is developed to validate the change management process in a collaborative environment. The authors employ the functionalities of the IBM Business Process Manager, including its recent Web 2.0 capabilities, to enhance collaboration between partners in the process of change. They demonstrate that the proposed solutions facilitate and enhance the process of change by effectively engaging all partners in a dynamic and collaborative way.