干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Internet enabled integration of processes, applications, and information systems facilitate rapid collaboration, coordination, and relationship formation across traditional organizational boundaries. A virtual network is concerned with identifying profitable new niches and organizing independent companies linked by information technologies to share skill, costs and access to one another's markets.

The main scope of this paper, is to propose a framework for a virtual network life cycle management, in order to share common business processes through an integration and knowledge enabled partner relationship management platform. Companies participating in a virtual network share business processes or/and outsource them to other members. A virtual network must support the requirements imposed by the partners, using telecommunication arid information technologies and providing safety mechanisms to ensure availability, confidentiality and integrity. It must also succeed in automating multi-organization collaboration in the areas of service conception and design, service development and engineering, and service management and scheduling. A network's success will strongly depend on its relationships with its business partners and on its customer/partner knowledge assets.