Abstract-Inter-organizational systems have significantly been affected by Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services -the state-of-the-art technology to implement SOA. SOA is said to enable quick and inexpensive changes of the IT in order to establish new business partnerships or to reflect changes in existing partnerships. However, current approaches to inter-organizational systems focus too much on existing Web Services standards and, thus, on the technology layer. In such an approach the technology drives the business. In this paper we analyze the shortcomings of this bottom-up approach. As an alternative we suggest a top-down methodology where the business requirements drive the technology. This methodology starts off with the business value perspective, leading to a business process perspective and resulting in an IT execution perspective. We do not invent any new approaches on each of these layers, rather we outline how existing approaches are used and combined into a business requirements driven approach to inter-organizational systems.

UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for modeling global B2B choreographies. The basic building blocks of UMM are business transactions, which describe the exchange of a business document and an optional response. In addition to these business document exchanges, UMM business transactions mandate business signals that acknowledge the correctness of business documents. It is expected that a business service interface (BSI) on each business partner's side reacts on incoming messages and on messages expected but not received. However the internal orchestration of the BSI is open to interpretations. In this paper we demonstrate an unambiguous mapping from global choreographies described by UMM transactions to a BPEL-based orchestration of the business service interface. It becomes obvious that rather simple looking UMM transactions lead to a more complex message exchange mechanism when implemented on top of Web Services.

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