The Enterprise Interoperability Center - An Institutional Framework Facilitating Enterprise Interoperability

During the last years, electronic collaboration between enterprises has significantly increased. To seamlessly integrate applications across company boundaries, all stakeholders have to adhere to common standards. Currently, cross-organizational business relationships are setup based on a plethora of standards that involve different technical representations, semantics, process specifications and also vary with respect to scope and granularity. 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. The abundance of different standards, but also the frequently divergent interests of stakeholders involved in the development and adoption of standards prevents enterprises from seamlessly interconnecting their applications. In this work, we leverage institutional economics to elaborate on a novel approach to facilitating enterprise interoperability. Not the creation of yet another standard, but the establishment and fostering of a proper institutional framework will significantly reduce the stakeholders’ uncertainty in deciding for and adopting a standard and thus drive seamless cross-organizational interoperability. A key outcome of the ATHENA-project, the Enterprise Interoperability Center (EIC) is expected to provide such an institutional framework. This work is devoted to analyzing this center on the basis of institutional economics in order to derive essential recommendations for it to emerge as the prevailing reference point for e-Business standards and to thus accelerate the seamless and efficient electronic collaboration between enterprises.