Towards a business network management

Abstract

Enterprises are part of value chains consisting of cross-enterprise business processes forming large business networks of customers, vendors, partners and competitors. These business process networks run on (technical) integration networks, which are semantically interlinked with the processes, while both are correlated to organizational (social) networks, consisting of technical and business domain experts. The insight into these networks promise a competitive advantage through the visibility into the linked enterprise data. However, this information is hidden in complex, dynamic and heterogeneous enterprise domains. In this position paper, we introduce the new domain of Business Network Management (BNM), which strives to make business networks visible within network views and sets them into context with each other. For that, we extend the Network Mining (NM) domain by a virtualized network approach towards a BNM. That means automatic discovery, mining and inference capabilities are combined with expert knowledge from different domains to compute the networks and a semantic correlation between entities of different perspectives. We comprehensively define the domain and discuss a system implementation, which we evaluated in a real-world customer case. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.