Marco Zapletal

A Survey of B2B Methodologies and Technologies: From Business Models towards Deployment Artifacts

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and service-based information exchange can be observed. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise. On a technical level, the focus in software development is moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These transitions on both levels promise a market entry at lower costs and an easier adjustment to changing market conditions. Hence, an overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches emerged in the past targeting the area of B2B - these are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper, we provide a survey of the most promising ones at both levels and classify them using the open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Furthermore, we discuss how individual specifications on different levels fit together - starting from business models via business processes to artifacts ready for deployment

Deriving executable BPEL from UMM Business Transactions

UN/CEFACTs 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 partners 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.

Inter-organizational systems: From business values over business processes to deployment

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.

From business to software: a B2B survey

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift can be observed from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and, finally to service-based 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 Open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Whereas on the technical level, service-oriented 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.

The development process of the UN/CEFACT modeling methodology

The development of inter-organizational systems requires a well defined development process. UN/CEFACTs Modeling Methodology (UMM) provides such a development process. We served as the editing team of the UMM 1.0 foundation module, which is defined as a UML profile. First experiences of applying UMM in real world projects have disclosed some limitations. Accordingly, we propose integrating new concepts into a new version 2.0 of UMM. In this paper, we show the adapted UMM development process, which is demonstrated by means of a waste management example.

An Analysis of Windows Workflow's Control-Flow Expressiveness

The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) has been introduced as part of the .NET framework as a means of creating workflow-centric applications. Its intended field of application is broad, ranging from fat-client applications and web applications to enterprise application integration solutions. Unlike other approaches Windows Workflow supports two distinct approaches to workflow specification – sequential workflows and state machine workflows - which deal with fundamentally different types of business scenarios. To date there has been minimal investigation into its capabilities and limitations, especially with respect to the two different control-flow styles it offers. To remedy this, in this paper we present a rigorous analysis of Windows Workflows ability to deal with common control-flow scenarios. As a framework for this evaluation we use the Workflow Patterns. Our analysis outlines the strength and shortcomings of Windows Workflows control-flow expressiveness and compares it to BPEL and jBPM - two other popular approaches for the design and implementation of business processes in a service-oriented context.

State-of-the-art in business document standards

With the raising significance of electronic commerce and e-government applications the need for standardized business documents has emerged. Today, a business partner seeking to implement a new electronic commerce solution may choose from a multitude of different standards. Most of the standards are domain-specific and thus heterogeneous, since standards are developed out of diverse needs, motivations, and backgrounds. What is still missing is a thorough overview of business document standard families. Furthermore, a classification helping a business partner to choose a specific standard, based on his preferences is needed. In this paper we present the key results of our business document survey, where we made a classification of business document standards using standard categories. For each category we introduce a representative standard example. Based on our research results, a clear and precise classification of different business document standardization approaches is provided. Through the classification, the distinctive advantages and disadvantages of each standard become clear. Thus, the decision which business document standard to use is eased.

UMM Add-In: A UML Extension for UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology

The tighter coupling of enterprises in regard to information system technology has also changed the way business processes are modeled. Modeling interorganizational business processes is necessary in order to gain a profound and unique representation of the processes involved. However this requires a new methodology especially designed for modeling inter-organizational business processes. The United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) took up the challenge and started to develop such a methodology. The research efforts became known as UN/CEFACTs modeling methodology (UMM) [1]. UMM enables the business modeler to capture the business knowledge independent of the underlying implementation technology such as ebXML or Web Services.

Process Mining for Electronic Data Interchange

Choreography modeling and service integration received a lot of attention in the last decade. However, most real-world implementations of inter-organizational systems are still realized by traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. In traditional EDI standards, the notion of process or choreography is not explicitly specified. Rather, every business document exchange stands for its own. This lack of process awareness in traditional EDI systems hinders organizations from applying Business Process Management (BPM) methods in such settings. To address this shortcoming, we seek to derive choreographies from EDI message exchanges. Thereby, we employ and extend process mining techniques, which have so far concentrated on business processes within single organizations. We discover the interaction sequences between the partners as well as the business information conveyed in the exchanged documents, which goes beyond the state-of-the-art in process mining. As a result, we lift the information gained on the IT level to the business level. This enables us to derive new insights that help organizations to improve their performance, e.g., an organization may get insights into the value of its business partnerships to support an efficient decision making process. This way we hope to bring the merits of BPM to inter-organizational systems realized by traditional EDI standards.

Inter-organizational success factors: a cause and effect model

Inter-organizational systems form the basis for successful business collaboration in the Internet and B2B e-commerce era. To properly design and manage such systems one needs to understand the structure and dynamics of the relationships between organizations. The evaluation of such inter-organizational relationships (IORs) is normally conducted using “success factors”. These are often referred to as constructs, such as trust and information sharing. In strategic management and performance analysis, different methods are employed for evaluating business performance and strategies, such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method. The BSC utilizes success factors for measuring and monitoring IORs against business strategies. For these reasons, a thorough understanding of success factors, the relationships between them, as well as their relationship to business strategies is required. In other words, understanding success factors allows strategists deriving measurements for success factors as well as aligning these success factors with business strategies. This underpins nowadays close relationship between business strategy, IORs and their realization by means of inter-organizational systems. In this paper, we present (1) a systematic literature review studying success factors and their impact on IORs as well as (2) an analysis of the results found. The review is based on 177 publications, published between 2000 and 2012, dealing with factors influencing IORs. The work presented provides an overview on success factors, influencing relationships between success factors, as well as their influence on the success of IORs. The work is somehow “meta-empirical” as it only looks at published studies and not on own cases. Consequently, it is based on the assumption that studies in scientific literature represent the real-world. The constructs and relationships found in the review are grouped based on their scope and summarized in a cause and effect model. The grouping of constructs results in five groups including Relationship Orientation, Relational Norm, Relational Capital, Atmosphere, and Others. Since the cause and effect model represents a directed graph, different network analysis methods may be applied for analyzing the model. In particular, an in- and out-degree analysis is applied on the cause and effect model for detecting the most influencing as well as the most influenced success factors.