IBIS – Interoperability in Business Information Systems Effective Business Process Outsourcing: The Prosero Approach Michael Elhadad, Mira Balaban Department of Computer Science Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva, Israel (elhadad,mira)@cs.bgu.ac.il Arnon Sturm Department of Information Systems Engineering Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva, Israel sturm@bgu.ac.il Abstract: The convergence between business process modeling and the service-oriented architecture has created a significant opportunity for Information Technology (IT) system integrators: they can offer effective business process outsourcing for Small Medium Enterprises (SME)s that often cannot afford the cost of designing, provisioning, and operating their own software service bus. In this paper, we present a methodology, and a corresponding implemented system Prosero, for managing multiple customized business processes, all derived from a small set of reference models. The methodology is based upon a semantic repository. The paper focuses on the structure of the semantic repository, and explains how specific operations in the end-to-end lifecycle of outsourced business processes benefit from the semantic services the Prosero repository delivers. Introduction During the last decade, many organizations have realized that their business success depends on the capability to adapt to the frequent changes within their reference market. One way of addressing these changes is via the management of the organization business processes. Business processes serve two purposes: (1) they specify the business operation and (2) they serve as requirements for the information systems that should support them. Many organizations have adopted this notion and implemented large scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relation Management (CRM) applications. However, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) do not have the required infrastructure for such systems, they do not have the expertise required to design industry standard business process applications, nor the IT infrastructure required to deploy such applications. As a result, SMEs miss the key benefits of the business process management methodology.