A Service-oriented Reference Architecture for Organizing Cross-Company Collaboration

Abstract

Today, cross-company collaboration is about to gain significant momentum, but still shows weaknesses with respect to productivity, flexibility and quality: Point-to-point, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)-based approaches or Managed File Transfer installations provide only limited functional richness and low reach as they often represent proprietary island solutions. A new generation of providers of software (Multienterprise/ Business-to-Business (B2B) Gateway solutions) and services (Integration-as-a-Service and B2B Project Outsourcing) for multienterprise interaction is about to emerge today and allows for richer interaction while reducing the costs for electronic transactions heavily. However, these products and services still exhibit weaknesses with respect to both managerial and technological aspects. In this work, we present and thoroughly discuss a service-oriented reference architecture for business media that overcome the drawbacks of today’s B2B software products and services. Based on the IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description (IEEE 1471-2000) in combination with Schmid’s Media Reference Model, this reference architecture provides four main views: community (structural organization), process (process-oriented organization), services and infrastructure.