Inter-organizational Systems: From Business Values over Business Processes to Deployment

Inter-organizational systems have significantly<br> been affected by Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) andWeb<br> Services - the state-of-the-art technology to implement SOA.<br> SOA is said to enable quick and inexpensive changes of the<br> IT in order to establish new business partnerships or to reflect<br> changes in existing partnerships. However, current approaches<br> to inter-organizational systems focus too much on existing Web<br> Services standards and, thus, on the technology layer. In such<br> an approach the technology drives the business. In this paper<br> we analyze the shortcomings of this bottom-up approach. As<br> an alternative we suggest a top-down methodology where the<br> business requirements drive the technology. This methodology<br> starts off with the business value perspective, leading to a<br> business process perspective and resulting in an IT execution<br> perspective. We do not invent any new approaches on each of<br> these layers, rather we outline how existing approaches are used<br> and combined into a business requirements driven approach<br> to inter-organizational systems.