HERA

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

This paper argues for a set of general design rules which shall constitute a foundation for the activities pursued by the Swiss e-Government Architecture Community (SEAC) . The focus thereby lies on electronic interoperation across the boundaries of companies and governmental institutions . It shall motivate members of the SEAC to propose amendments or extensions towards a comprehensive, common understanding.

Today, cross-company collaboration is about to gain significant momentum, but still shows weaknesses with respect to productivity, flexibility and quality: A lack of standardized supporting e-Business solutions, unclear terminology and unstructured business processes prevent from seamless interoperability and the fast development of a globally networked service economy. New concepts are now required which facilitate a comprehensive industrialization of related concepts and methodologies. In this work, we revisit the evolution of computer programming and derive essential principles which drove its industrialization during the past decades. In combination with the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM), we leverage these key principles to transfer them to the field of cross-company collaboration. We apply the extended MRM to the specific case of governmental administration in Switzerland, which represents a cross-organizational service industry with significant potential for performance enhancement. The analysis shows that organizations in the public sector may improve productivity, quality and flexibility of their collaboration by adhering to the MRM which transfers programming principles to the context of human organizations.

One of the most challenging issues in current e-Government initiatives is the seamless exchange of information and the efficient collaboration between public administrations, companies and the private sector. Either from an intra- or cross-organisational point of view spanning processes across multiple authorities leads to a collaboration of autonomous units under consideration of law and regulations. Despite the organisational dimension current approaches are mainly technical solutions - e.g. interoperability frameworks. Within this paper we present an integrated approach which incorporates organisational aspects of the public sector and which supports the correspondent implementation of solutions for cross-organisational e-Government by adopting Model-Driven-Development practices

Web Services have experienced great interest during the last years as they were expected to act as enablers of seamless application-to-application integration both within company boundaries and on a global scale. However, a truly global mesh of interoperable services has not yet become reality due to various reasons. Novel technologies and design principles are now about to emerge which shift the Internet towards a major inflection point: It is envisioned to evolve as a global platform for the retrieval, combination and utilization of interoperable resources. In this article, we contrast the Internet of today and the envisioned Internet of Services along three major categories: Stakeholders, Applications and finally Technology. We conclude with an analysis of the important role this emerging Internet of Services will play as technological enabler of information services industrialization: By reducing different kinds of waste, the Internet of Services acts as enabler of Lean Service Management. http://www.christoph-schroth.de http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/servlet/opac?punumber=4444189

Today, electronic cross-company collaboration is about to gain significant momentum, but still shows weaknesses with respect to productivity, flexibility and quality: a lack of standardized supporting e-business solutions, unclear terminology and unstructured business processes prevent from seamless interoperability and the fast development of a globally networked service economy. A novel approach is now required which facilitates a comprehensive industrialization of related concepts and methodologies. In this work, we present the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM) and extend it to fulfill the specific needs of electronic, cross-organizational collaboration. Based on the three components "Organizational" (structural as well as process-oriented organization of interaction between agents), "Logical" (common language between agents) and "Physical" (the physical infrastructure enabling interaction), we amend the reference model by introducing key principles which improved the performance of computer programming during the past decades. To show its real-world applicability and potential for performance enhancement, we apply this extended MRM to the specific case of governmental administration in Switzerland.