The EIC - A consensus-centric approach for cross-organizational e-Business standards diffusion

Abstract

During the last years, electronic enterprise collaboration has significantly increased. To seamlessly integrate applications across company boundaries, all stakeholders have to adhere to common standards. Currently, cross-organizational business relationships are being setup based on a wide variety of existing standards that involve different technical representations, semantics and process specifications. The resulting business standards dilemma prevents corporations from seamlessly cooperating with each other. State-of-the-art standards tackle parts of this interoperability issue by providing flexible and semantically more precise specifications, but have not yet been widely adopted. In this work, we propose a novel approach towards the realization of enterprise application integration: Not the creation of yet another e-Business standard, but the joint agreement and implementation of an adequate standard among a critical mass of companies will foster enterprise interoperability. The Enterprise Interoperability Center (EIC) is envisioned to promote this approach and to provide users a platform to jointly create and agree upon reference business processes and to document that work as templates for the setup of cross-organizational business collaborations. In this work, we thoroughly elaborate on the EIC goals and paradigms, analyze the target market and present ways to successfully disseminate this newly established center.