Nirmit Desai

Interorganizational Business Interactions: Contracts, Processes, Evolution Nirmit Desai

Services are distinguished from products by theirinteractive nature, long-lasting businessrelationships among the engaged parties, and agradual exchange of value over time. Today, Anincreasing portion of the world economy isrepresented by services instead of products. Thus, itis crucial to develop new methods for modeling, analyzing, and enacting service engagements thatsupport the above distinguishing aspects of services. However, the current approaches are not suitable forthe service-oriented economy because they offer onlyproduct-oriented abstractions. This monographprovides a technical framework with rigorous formalunderpinnings to develop and maintain IT systems forservice engagements. It has three main components:(1) a business-level method based on the notion ofcommitments for modeling services, (2) techniques formodeling and analysis of contracts via commitments, and (3) a method for systematically accommodatingevolving business requirements. Beyond the scholarlyimpact, this work has influenced at least twopractical efforts: standardization of foreignexchange processes under TWIST and study of businesscontracts under European Union IST-CONTRACT project.