What is enterprise interoperability?

Enterprise interoperability denotes the capability of enterprises (e.g., companies, organisations from public sector, independent units within organisations) to govern mutual activities with the help of their independent computing systems.

Obstacles for enterprise interoperability can arise from conceptual and technological domains, but also from the organisational domain. Examples of conceptual barriers include mismatches on the essential concepts on the business area, like one security-service producer considering security to include physical security measures only, while the client acts on software licencing where software tools would be more relevant. Examples of technological barriers include mismatches in computing platforms and their communciation. Finally, organisational barriers arise in the mismatches on expected responsibility and authority structures used in partner enterprises, causing mismatches on decision-making and approval processes involving all partner enterprises.

Therefore, enterprise interoperability is addressed by multidiciplinary research: social, organisational, economical, business sciences; computer science and software engineering; and modeling of organisations, software and systems. Research methods involved also vary depending on the aspect under study, but due to the nature of the field, should always combine the user requirements (enterprise, people, interoperation from enterprise to another) with the aligned computing solutions.

What is enterprise computing?

Research on enterprise computing involves aspects of creating, managing and supporting intra- and inter-enterprise distributed application systems, i.e. systems involving processes, people and technology. Aspects of interest include engineering technologies and methods, enterprise application development and management, enterprise architectures, distributed computing platforms, enterprise computing systems, integration and interoperability of solutions, service-oriented architectures and business process management.

In comparison to enterprise interoperability, the scope of enterprise computing is more focused on the distributed computing domain, with the research methodologies arising from computer science, architecture development, and software engineering. It should however be remembered that enterprise interoperability requires a suitable enterprise computing environment.

What is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise architecture is a structure that considers the enterprise's business needs, information resources, computing solutions and processing capabilities as a whole, where each element has a precise role and is connected to other elements. Before we can improve enterprise interoperability in general or build specific utilities, we must understand a lot more in depth what constitutes as an Enterprise architecture. That vision will help us understanding Ecosystem architecture as well.

What are the current trends in enterprise interoperability? At present, the main theme in enterprise interoperability is to create a utility-like capability for enterprises to support their business activities. The business should at the same time move towards knowledge-oriented collaborations and semantic interoperability.

Elements of the enterprise interoperability utilities needed include in practice

• service discovery and selection services,
• trust and privacy management,
• business process enactment or governance of active service following a contracted business process,
• contracting services for governing collaborations between enterprises,
• service-oriented enterprise architectures to create shared concepts between enterprises,
• computing platforms, such as cloud computing,
• models of ecosystems within which collaborations are supported.

Besides this, an important trend is to move towards service-oriented enterprise architectures.

What are suitable topics for this seminar?

The focus in spring 2014 is in interoperability management - either enterprise interoperability or service interoperability management. As the scopes differ, also the solutions have interesting differences.

Facilities needed in both interoperability utility approaches include ontologies, metamodel usage in design and runtime of collaborations, monitoring and breach management, just to mention a few. Interesting current case studies also fall in interoperability of cloud-based systems or interoperability management needs specific for mobile clients in business computing context.