From business to software: a B2B survey

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift can be observed from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and, finally to service-based information exchange. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise; further initiatives address the identification of customer services and the formalization of business service level agreements (SLA). On a lower, i.e., technical level, the focus is on moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These developments promise more flexibility, a market entry at lower costs and an easier IT-alignment to changing market conditions. This explains the overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches targeting the area of B2B—these approaches are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper we provide a survey of the most promising approaches at both levels and classify them using the Open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Whereas on the technical level, service-oriented architecture is becoming the predominant approach, on the business level the landscape is more heterogeneous. In this context, we propose—in line with the services science approach—to integrate business modeling with process modeling in order to make the transformation from business services to Web services more transparent.