The paper investigates the challenges of process ownership in business processes crossing organizational boundaries. A literature review explores the research traditions of business process reengineering, inter-organizational systems (IOS), workflow management, and system development with regard to process ownership and the changing role from intra-organizational issues to inter-organizational issues. The result is a list of relevant process owner tasks, classified by different issues in which a shift of focus is suggested.

A case study of a governmental process portal serves the purpose of exemplifying the novel process ownership challenges in an inter-organizational context. Analyzing the case form the process ownership perspective reveals that the proposed shift of focus is indeed applicable and how neglecting these new challenges are a barrier for successful transformation.

With the categorization and shift of focus suggested in this paper, future research may investigate in more detail the dilemmas of distributed versus centralized ownership and bring out different models of inter-organizational process ownership to support handling the related issues in an integrated way.