From business to software: a B2B survey

Abstract

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift can be observed from document centric filebased interchange of business information to process-centric and, finally to servicebased information exchange. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise; further initiatives address the identification of customer services and the formalization of business service level agreements (SLA). On a lower, i.e., technical level, the focus is on moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These developments promise more flexibility, a market entry at lower costs and an easier IT-alignment to changing market conditions. This explains the overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches targeting the area of B2B-these approaches are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper we provide a survey of the most promising approaches at both levels and classify them using the Openedi reference model standardized by ISO. Whereas on the technical level, serviceoriented architecture is becoming the predominant approach, on the business level the landscape is more heterogeneous. In this context, we propose-in line with the services science approach-to integrate business modeling with process modeling in order to make the transformation from business services to Web services more transparent.

Services Discovery as a Mean to Enhance Software Resources Sharing in Collaborative Networks

“…Coping with all the requirements involved in the envisaged collaborative scenario of services discovery and sharing is extremely complex and also involves several challenges at business and IT levels [24].…”

SOA adoption in business networks: do service-oriented architectures really advance inter-organizational integration?

“…Business processes comprise sequences of activities that may be distributed across various organizational units and are considered the core of IT-based value creation (Melville et al 2004;Österle et al 2001). Moreover, SOA literature claims that SOA supports seamless process integration within and across company boundaries (Bussler 2002;Dorn et al 2009;Papazoglou and van den Heuvel 2007).…”

“…The fourth proposition (P4) holds that SOA might overcome those difficulties by introducing a process-centric approach to integrate partners based on open Internet standards (Bussler 2002;Dorn et al 2009;Legner and Vogel 2008). High occurrences of machine-tomachine integration as well as pragmatic, semantic and syntactic standards would be the preconditions for the process-centric partner integration.…”

Supporting Software Services Discovery and Sharing in Collaborative Networks

“…Coping with all the requirements involved in the envisaged collaborative scenario of services discovery and sharing is extremely complex and also involves several challenges at business and IT levels [30]. The first point refers to which information should be expressed to specify the desired service for the given BP.…”