1 Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is commonly lauded as a silver bullet for Enterprise Application Integration, inter-organizational business processes implementation, and even as a general solution for the development of all complex Web-oriented applications. However, SOA without semantic descriptions of its data, processes and messaging models fails to achieve a truly flexible and dynamic...

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 i...

Agents and multiagent systems (MAS) have already proved suitable for dealing with the complexity of today B2B application scenarios. Application environments such as virtual enterprises (VE) and inter-organizational workflow management systems (WfMS) specially call for the integration of heterogeneous resources, services, and processes. In this article, we first recognize VE and workflow manage...

This paper describes the negotiation component of E-Alliance, a software infrastructure defined for supporting negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organizational alliances. The E-Alliance’s main intent is to preserve the autonomy of organizations grouped in an alliance. The purpose of this work is to offer support for small and medium enterprises which cannot or do not want to fulfill a ...

Inter-organizational business process models are created and used by different partner networks. Often, those models are similar but differ in certain business needs. Due to the lack of methods and tools, companies are required to start from scratch to create their specific models instead of taking advantage of and re-using already existing models. Therefore, we first analyze reference modeling...

Change is an absolutely essential component of product development. However, some changes are too difficult to manage. It is contended that the difficult changes stem from the emergence of novelty. The significance of novelty is that it is not immediately apparent and can be overlooked. It is a common element in disruptive technology, knowledge management, and firefighting research. This work e...

The CEC Project GOAL (Esprit 6283) aims to develop generic software tools to support a new project management paradigm, in which projects are collaborative, decentralised and inter-organizational. To support inter-organizational interaction, communication and cooperation, we are developing a design framework for formalizing the flow of information between organizations, specifying access to and...

Organizations are increasingly implementing process-improvement techniques like Six Sigma, total quality management, lean, and business process re-engineering to improve organizational performance. These techniques are part of a process management system that includes the organizational infrastructure to support the improvement techniques. The knowledge-based view of a firm argues that organiza...

Firms are seeking competitive advantages through supply chain management (SCM) to stay competitive in today’s global market. An inevitable endeavor of SCM is to promote information transparency that enables firms to coordinate supply chain activities efficiently to better meet ever-changing customer demand. Effective SCM requires that the underlying information technology infrastructure of the ...