PhD ceremony mr. F.B.E. van Blommestein: Structured communication for dynamic business. An architecture for flexible B2B communication

PhD ceremony: mr. F.B.E. van Blommestein, 16.15 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Structured communication for dynamic business. An architecture for flexible B2B communication

Promotor(s): prof. J.C. Wortmann

Faculty: Economics

Enterprises and other organizations use computers for many of their business processes. Yet, whenever those business processes cross the organization's boundary, manual processing of information takes over. Only in cases where long lasting alliances between organizations deploy well defined, standard business processes, computer application systems are interconnected. Establishing such interconnection is costly and time consuming.

Most alliances between organizations (seller-buyer, client-service provider, regulator-civilian) are too incidental and too volatile to afford computer interconnection at the application level. In this thesis an architecture is presented for business application systems to interconnect on the fly. In order to interconnect, application systems must be able to negotiate information requirements and information availability, under the condition of information sharing policies. Information requirements are dependent on specific steps in the business process, so business process flows should be negotiable as well.

The architecture that is defined in this thesis may be natively implemented in business information systems (such as Enterprise Resource Planning systems), in middleware, or it may be offered as a service to interconnect existing systems. Legacy systems that are not capable to establish external connections may be complemented with a web form based solution. Such a solution is described in this thesis as well. This thesis proposes a fundament for organizations to use structured communication between their application systems in order to support dynamic business relationships.