Towards Interoperability through Inter-enterprise Collaboration Architectures

Abstract

Abstract. Most enterprise architectures published so far are capable of generating reasonably good descriptive models for individual enterprises to enable integration, organization and synchronization of enterprise elements: organizational structure, business processes, information systems and technology infrastructure, among others. However, research in this field applied to the extended enterprise or inter-enterprise architectures that takes into account the growing trend towards complex collaborative environments is very scarce. In this sense, this article seeks to analyze, link and synthesize the researches that has addressed the disciplines of enterprise architecture and business collaboration, in order to identify possible future research needs from the conceptualization made.

Inter-Enterprise Architecture and Internet of the Future

“…So far, in the context of the current research, three papers have been published that consolidate the state of the art research in three main topics: strategic alignment, enterprise collaboration and enterprise architecture [2,3,4]. In this section, we are going to brief the reader in a general way about the principal conclusions deduced in these papers, after a deep analysis of the literature.…”

“…In [3], business collaboration is defined as: "A joint process between members of the SC, where the decisions are made jointly, based on the information shared and exchanged on a bilateral form, achieving coordinate and synchronize joint activities to meet customer requirements and achieve process efficiency sets to generate a mutually beneficial".…”

“…In [3], Enterprise Architecture is defined as: "A discipline that provides a set of principles, methods, models and tools used for analysis, design and redesign of a company, thus allowing to represent and document the elements that form the company (such as organizational structure, business processes, systems information and technology infrastructure) and the relations, organization and joints between these elements, allowing the company to be represented in a holistic and integrated perspective, in order to achieve the business objectives and facilitate decision-making processes"…”

“…The definition of a methodology facilitates the implementation of the architecture [18]; the framework allows a graphic and simple structure of the elements that make up the enterprise [19] and how these elements are related [18]; furthermore, modeling language allows for modeling, organization and understanding of the relationships between elements of the enterprise [3].…”

Towards the development of the framework for inter sensing enterprise architecture

“…In Vargas et al (2011) According to Kilgeret al (2008), the collaboration process consists of six activities. However, this generic process has not taken a certain crucial aspect into account: the definition of how to share benefits equitably to ensure the stability of the collaboration (Audy et al 2010).…”