A Reference Architecture for Electronic Business-to-Business Collaboration Setup and Enactment Systems

The question what a business-to-business (B2B) collaboration setup
and enactment application-system should look like remains open. An important
element of such collaboration constitutes the inter-organizational disclosure of
business-process details so that the opposing parties may protect their business secrets.
For that purpose, eSourcing [37] has been developed as a general businessprocess
collaboration concept in the framework of the EU research project Cross-
Work. The eSourcing characteristics are guiding for the design and evaluation of
an eSourcing Reference Architecture (eSRA) that serves as a starting point for
software developers of B2B-collaboration systems. In this paper we present the
results of a scenario-based evaluation method conducted with the earlier specified
eSourcing Architecture (eSA) that generates as results risks, sensitivity, and
tradeoff points that must be paid attention to if eSA is implemented. Additionally,
the evaluation method detects shortcomings of eSA in terms of integrated
components that are required for electronic B2B-collaboration. The evaluation
results are used for the specification of eSRA, which comprises all extensions
for incorporating the results of the scenario-based evaluation, on three refinement
levels.