HERA Architecture: Enabling Seamless Cross-Organizational Collaboration for Swiss Public Administration

Cross-company collaboration is about to gain significant momentum and facilitates the emergence of a globally networked service economy. However, the organization of such business relationships still shows considerable weaknesses with respect to productivity, flexibility and quality. In this article, we propose a novel architecture for electronic business media which support seamless cross-organizational interaction of agents. The architecture builds on the St. Gallen Media Reference Model and accounts for the four architectural views Community, Processes, Services and Infrastructure. We thoroughly elaborate on this architecture and also argue that besides media, adapters are required to mediate between diverse media as well as between media and agents. Finally, agents and their respective local software applications play a significant role for our architecture. We apply this architecture to the scenario of collaborative tax declarations in Switzerland to emphasize the performance improvement potential.

http://www.univie.ac.at/RI/IRIS2008/
http://www.univie.ac.at/RI/php/programm_08_fr.php