LEVERAGING THE PUBLISH-FIND-USE PARADIGM OF SOA Supporting enterprise collaboration across organisational boundaries

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been widely recognized as an approach for flexible integration of enterprise applications across organisational boundaries based on service abstractions and Internet standards. Enterprise collaboration and application integration is driven by business requirements, which in turn are translated to business models and expressed as business processes. For example, business processes can be used to represent the coordination of several published services as well as the implementation of a composite value-added service. In this way, enterprise functions are aggregated using multi-stage business processes fulfilling the specific requirements of an enterprise. In order for enterprises to stay competitive in their respective businesses, such solutions must evolve in a timely and appropriate way in response to changes in market demands and opportunities that inevitably occur. Therefore, a mechanism is required for business-IT alignment during the complete lifecycle of SOA-based enterprise collaboration and application integration. In this paper, we discuss issues related to cross-organisational collaboration and how service-oriented principles and architectures can be applied to address these issues.