Vonk and Grefen have provided an excellent treatment of transaction support for cross-organizational business processes. This timely paper elaborates on the components of electronic contracts (a fundamental instrument in articulating service levels), making mutual commitments, and delivering to or recovering from these commitments in a dynamic collaboration environment.

The paper then leads to the definition of an e-service, and discusses intra- and cross-organization process models, extending to the X-transaction model. Explanations on I-step and X-step provide a good lead into the compensation model. The authors bring in the concept of safe point, a mark of consistent state of the process, extending it to X-step for cross-organizational transactions, and discuss rollback or recovery scenarios in the case of failure. A good set of rollback examples is provided to reinforce the theme of the paper, with extensions to the X-transaction model to provide support for multiparty outsourcing and rollback migrations using compensating activities. A good description is provided on an implementation prototype of the cross-organizational transaction support model using Crossflow and IBM MQ series.

With business process outsourcing (BPO) becoming more prevalent, transaction support for a global environment is becoming more critical. The authors have stated more than once that organizations outsource supporting processes, while concentrating on core processes. With BPO, companies do outsource their core processes, and the paper is applicable in such scenarios. The paper could have been enhanced with discussions on the transaction support available in some commercial engines.