Despite their business value and return on investment, multi-enterprise integration projects are unbearably costly for many companies. With a view to realizing lower integration costs and resources, ...enterprises are seeking partner attributes that display the ease of B2B collaboration. This paper examines the relationship of B2B interoperability to integration effort. It breaks down enterprise interoperability into five layers (network, data, process, application, business) and investigates the particularity and effect of each. The research model is validated by a field study using data from 239 firms. Interoperability at the business, process, and data levels is found to be significantly but negatively associated with integration efforts. Interoperability at the application level showed little relation to integration efforts, and interoperability at the network level had a nonsignificant positive relationship with integration efforts. The research model and findings are a starting point for assessing interoperability with a potential partner at each layer and for estimating the involved integration effort, with a view to aiding e-partnership decisions and B2B integration management.
Government transformation is a new term used to signify practices undertaken by governments in order to change their processes and services towards the electronic automation. As services are being ...transformed every day in many countries, the involved stakeholders are in urgent need for introducing and utilizing powerful instruments to facilitate and organize service composition and provision. This paper presents the inspiration of a conceptual model capable to originate an effective, scalable e-Government ontology and further on, the implementation of an ontology-based repository for designing, modelling and even reengineering of governmental services; pilot tested in the Greek Government.
During the last decades eGovernment has been a vivid, dynamic research and development area. As services are being transformed, electronic documents and web services appear every day in many ...countries, the involved stakeholders are in urgent need for an instrument to structure governmental administration processes, service composition and provision - in a way that eGovernment transformation can be constantly managed. This paper presents the creation of an eGovernment ontology, and the development of a knowledge-based registry of governmental services in Greece. This Registry is an advanced web portal, devoted to the formal description, composition and publishing of traditional, electronic and web services, including the relevant electronic documents, information systems and as well the process descriptions and the work-flow models in an integrated knowledge base. Through such a repository, the discovery of services by users or systems has been automated, resulting in an important tool for achieving interoperable eGovernment transformation.
The need for centralized e-Government strategies and policies is a fertile ground for the development of e-Government INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORKS (eGIFs). Integrated information systems and one-stop ...public services to citizens and businesses are heavily dependent on the resolution of the ever-expanding interoperability challenge and the satisfaction of public services' stakeholders. This can only be realistically addressed if the scope of eGIFs is widened, to include service composition and discovery, security standards, certification of public sites, as well as unified data models for achieving a common understanding of semantics at a syntax-independent level. The Greek eGIF presents a transition from paper-based specifications to a robust system that acts as a repository of systems, services, data schemas, certification tools and training material. This paper presents the objectives, the overall methodology and the architecture of the Greek eGIF, that meets today's demands for modelling, storing, managing and updating a vast number of eGovernment-related information.
Over the last decade great expectations have been placed on enterprise knowledge modelling and management through ontologies. However, most of the existing ontological approaches concentrate on the ...internal part of business and the issue of e-business process modelling still remains a big challenge for research to tackle. Furthermore, interoperability is the key factor which will drive e-business to the next level by offering fully automated transactions among enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning or supply chain management systems. In this regard, this paper presents a cohesive ontology-based framework for developing an e-business transactions repository, in which interoperable transactions of heterogeneous business domains-enterprises, governmental and banking institutions are going to be modelled (cross-sector and cross-border). Such an Interoperability repository is a system devoted to the formal description, composition and publishing of traditional, electronic, or Web services, together with the relevant documents, rules and process descriptions in an integrated schema. Through this approach, the discovery of e-business transactions can be automated, resulting in an important tool for managing e-business transformation and change and achieving in parallel cross-sector and cross-border interoperability.
Interoperability is the key factor which will drive e-Business to the next level by offering fully automated transactions among Enterprise Applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning or Supply ...Chain Management systems. Nowadays, research seems to have dealt with the problem of interoperability in various business domains, however the issue of interoperability in heterogeneous business domains — Enterprises, Governmental and Banking Institutions of different countries (cross-border) or Enterprises of different interests (cross-sector) - remains still a big challenge. This paper presents generic models of the most common business transactions carried out mainly by Small and Medium Enterprises. These models are constructed using state-of-the art notations and methodologies which facilitate the Application-to-Application interconnection and the automated business documents exchange between enterprises, governmental and banking institutions, covering not only national or sector specific business domain transactions but also cross-border and cross-sector processes, which imply different requirements as apart from the differences in the execution way, different legal rules and data entities, are also present.
