Heterogeneous customer requirements in combination with technological improvements enable new or improved customer-driven
business processes. The management of such processes requires a deep but flexible integration of enterprises. In this context
new forms of cooperation like E-Collaboration, describing the efficient and effective collaboration of participants in a value-added
network, arise. In order to manage customer-driven business processes across such networks, existing concepts for business
process management need to be adapted and extended. In this paper an E-Collaboration architecture is presented, that shows
how cross-enterprise, customer-driven processes can be planned, implemented and controlled. The architecture is based on the
differentiation of global and local knowledge in the widely used Architecture for Integrated Information Systems (ARIS), developed
at the IWi. Another important building block is the life-cycle-model that serves as a guideline for the process-oriented creation
and operation of collaborations towards a common customer-driven production and bundling of goods and services.
Key words E-Collaboration - Customer-Driven Process Management - Inter-Organizational Business Processes - Architecture - Process-Oriented Life-Cycle