Business collaboration networks provide collaborative organizations a favorable context for automated business process interoperability. This paper aims to present a novel approach for assessing interoperability of process driven services by considering the three main aspects of interoperation: potentiality, compatibility and operational performance. It presents also a software tool that supports the proposed assessment method. In addition to its capacity to track and control the evolution of interoperation degree in time, the proposed tool measures the required effort to reach a planned degree of interoperability. Public accounting of financial authority is given as an illustrative case study of interoperability monitoring in public collaboration network.
Deep Dive into A Novel Approach for Periodic Assessment of Business Process Interoperability.
Business collaboration networks provide collaborative organizations a favorable context for automated business process interoperability. This paper aims to present a novel approach for assessing interoperability of process driven services by considering the three main aspects of interoperation: potentiality, compatibility and operational performance. It presents also a software tool that supports the proposed assessment method. In addition to its capacity to track and control the evolution of interoperation degree in time, the proposed tool measures the required effort to reach a planned degree of interoperability. Public accounting of financial authority is given as an illustrative case study of interoperability monitoring in public collaboration network.
Organisations should prepare themselves to provide fully integrated services for their customers, partners and suppliers. In this context, horizontal cooperation within business collaborative networks has become a key enabler for e-business. Indeed, the delivery of value added online services often requires cooperation between two or more entities. This cooperation goes from simple information exchange and can reach business processes interoperability among collaborative businesses [1]. Establishing business process interoperability is not an end in itself, but an enabling capability for the strategic goal of collaboration establishment [2]. In this context, the present work focuses on monitoring the interoperability degree between automated business-processes involved in the provision of an integrated e-service. The studied processes may be located within a s ingle organization or across organizational boundaries. In this sense, the proposed approach based on a measurement method [3] consists of five steps and takes into account the main aspects of interoperability.
The objective of this work is to: (1) Identify the most important characteristics of interoperability of business process driven services. This work proposes a set of criteria used to assess interoperability in this context considering all aspects of collaboration situation. (2) Describe a periodic assessment approach of interoperation driven by enterprise architecture paradigm. This allows knowing what is needed to reach a planned level of interoperability. In this article, the second section is devoted to e-business system interoperability. The third section presents the “RatIop” assessment method that is based on a s et of IT indicators for interoperability measurement. The fourth section proposes the monitoring approach model adopted in this study. It presents also the platform developed to support interoperability monitoring of business process driven services.
Interoperability characterizes the ability, for any number of processing information systems, to interact and exchange information and services between them. It requires a collective approach, an understanding of how each collaborating businesses operates and the development of arrangements which effectively manage business processes that cut across organizational boundaries [2].
Collaborative enterprises face technical and semantic difficulties [4] in order to establish interoperability. They face also organizational challenges [5]. Moreover, monitoring interoperability is not easy on such a macroscopic level.
In fact, interoperability is an information system quality that can be viewed from various perspectives. Several taxonomies have been proposed in this direction. In this sense, there are:
• Many levels of interoperability concern: business, process, service and data level [6]. • Various approaches to establish interoperability: integrated, federated, and unified approach [7]. • Multiple barriers could handicap interoperation: conceptual, organizational and technical barriers [8]. • Different scopes of application: within the same organization, cross independent organizations [9],
• Different transactional aspects of cooperation: synchronous or asynchronous collaboration [10]. • Diverse measurement perspectives: potentiality, compatibility, performance efficiency [11].
Thus, in terms of concern, there are various levels where interoperability takes place within a business collaboration network (BCN) [6]:
• Business level that refers to how to work within a business network in harmonized way in order to collaborate. • Process level aims making various processes working together. In the case of a networked administration, internal processes of two entities are connected to create a common macro process. • Service level is concerned with identifying, composing, and making function together with various applications. • Data level refers to making synergy between different data models and heterogeneous conceptual schemas. Also, in terms of barriers, the interoperability implementation faces [8]:
• Conceptual barriers which are related to the syntactic and semantic problems of information to be exchanged. • Organizational barriers which refer to the definition of responsibilities and authority so that interoperability can take place. • Technical barriers which deal with the use of adequate protocols, languages and infrastructure in communication. In this case, interoperation compatibility check has to consider these barriers on each one of the four enterprise architecture layers cited below (Business, Process, Service, Data) [12]. Regarding the measurement aspects, [11] differentiate between the following complementary characteristics:
• Interoperation potentiality: it is an «internal quality» of a system that reflects its preparation to interoperate. This involves identifying a set of characteristics that have an impact on communication with partner’s systems without nece
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