Enhancing enterprise collaboration by using multifaceted services

Abstract

In fast changing markets, dynamic collaboration ability involves establishing and "enacting" business relationships on the fly in an adaptive way. Such dynamic organization relies on interoperable and agile IT solutions. A contemporary approach for addressing these critical issues is the Service Oriented Architecture which can be introduced to implement opened and flexible information system. Accordingly, collaborative processes can be implemented as a chain of services resulting of a service composition process. Nevertheless, combining "directly" elementary IT services from different enterprises may lack of security (as the different enterprises can get information of the partner IS organization) and leads to highly complex system due to the IT service granularity. To overcome these limits, we have developed a service oriented enterprise model which transforms enterprise structure as a set of well defined Virtual Service. Virtual Services are used to orchestrate more elementary IT services and are combined together to form the service chain according to different policies. As contractual relationships between enterprises are concerned, a particular attention must be paid on the service level agreements to support an end to end convenient quality of service level. That is why, we propose to couple the Virtual Service description to a dynamic service level management system, orchestrated thanks to elementary agents. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.