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Cross-organizational business processes are common in today’s economy. Of necessity, enterprises conduct their business in cooperation to create products and services for the marketplace. Thus business processes inherently involve autonomous partners with heterogeneous software designs and implementations. Based on the abstractions they use, existing cross-organizational modeling approaches can be broadly classified as high-level and low-level. The high-level approaches such as e3value are too high-level, and cannot be easily operationalized. The low-level approaches such as BPMN and WS-CDL employ control and data flows, which lead to highly rigid processes, and lack business semantics. We propose a novel high-level business model based on agent-oriented abstractions of agent, role, goal, and commitment. In contrast to existing approaches, our model gives primacy to the contractual relationships among the business partners. In our approach, a set of reusable patterns model recurring business scenarios. A step-by-step methodology guides a modeler in developing a business model starting from an informal description of a cross-organizational scenario. We develop an approach employing NuSMV, an existing model checker, to verify an operationalization specified as UML sequence diagrams with respect to a business model. A developer study found that our approach yields improved model quality compared to RosettaNet, a traditional approach widely used in the industry.