Towards an Integrated Model for Enterprise Interoperability

Wided Gu

edria

SSI, CRP Henri Tudor, 29 JFK, Luxembourg-Kircheberg, Luxembourg

wided.guedria@tudor.lu

Keywords:

Enterprise Interoperability, Interoperability Maturity, Framework, Integrated Model.

Abstract:

One of the challenges faced by a network of enterprises is the development of interoperability between its

members. Transformations in this context are usually driven by Enterprise Interoperability (EI) problems that

may be faced. In order to quickly overcome these problems, enterprises need characterizing and assessing

interoperability to be prepared to establish means for collaboration. Maturity models have been developed

in response to this challenge. In this paper, we propose to deﬁne an integrated model based on a maturity

model and an ontological formalization of the enterprise interoperability domain. This will allow diagnosing

interoperability problems when assessing interoperability. The integrated model could be used improve the

capability of an enterprise to interoperate based on a shared understanding of interoperability.

1 INTRODUCTION

As information systems and technologies grow in

complexity and scope, the need for a coherent

and comprehensive modeling approach becomes of

paramount importance. The enterprise architecture

deals with these issues in a coherent and integral fash-

ion while at the same time a medium to achieve a

shared understanding and conceptualization among

all stakeholders involved and govern enterprise de-

velopment based on this conceptualization (Proper,

2008). The intent of an enterprise architecture is to

determine how an organization can most effectively

achieve its current and future objectives. Among

these objectives, we focus on improving the capability

of the enterprise to interoperate with future partners.

The complexity of an organization can be huge

due to many processes, departments and information

systems involved. To provide architects with some

structure, architecture frameworks have been intro-

duced. These frameworks intend to aid architects by

providing a meta-model (e.g. an ontology) which uses

different abstraction levels to map all kinds of infor-

mation needed. As part of EA, some of the models

should be dedicated to interoperability, as an impor-

tant issue that have to be taken into account to reach

the business objectives. To our knowledge, none of

the existing Enterprise Interoperability (EI) frame-

works proposes a shared understanding and concep-

tualization of interoperability while improving the ca-

pability of an enterprise to interoperate.

In this paper, we propose to deﬁne an integrated

framework that deﬁnes and improves the enterprise

interoperability. The paper is structured as follows:

section 2 deﬁnes the research ontext and reviews some

of the related work. Based on that, section 3 deﬁnes

and describes the integrated framework. Section 4

gives an example to use the proposed model. Con-

clusion and future work are outlined in section 5.

2 RELATED WORK

In the current globalised and networked society, en-

terprises need to collaborate with other enterprises to

meet their own added values and to exploit the market

opportunities. A major issue in global collaboration

and cooperation is the development of interoperabil-

ity. Many deﬁnitions of interoperability have been

proposed in the literature. A review of them can be

found in (Gu

edria, 2012). The most known deﬁnition

is the one proposed by the IEEE, considering inter-

operability as the ability of two or more systems or

components to exchange information and to use the

information that has been exchanged (IEEE, 1990).

2.1 Enterprise Interoperability

Frameworks

The main purpose of an interoperability framework

is to provide an organising mechanism so that con-

cepts, problems and knowledge on EI can be repre-

196

GuÃl’dria W.

Towards an Integrated Model for Enterprise Interoperability.

DOI: 10.5220/0005426001960201

In Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2014), pages 196-201

ISBN: 978-989-758-032-1

sented in a more structured way (Chen et al., 2008).

So far, the most known EI frameworks are: ATHENA

(Advanced Technologies for interoperability Hetero-

geneous Enterprise Networks and Applications) In-

teroperability Framework (AIF) (Ruggaber, 2006),

the European Interoperability Framework (CompTIA,

2004), the E-health interoperability framework (NE-

HTA, 2005) and the Framework for Enterprise In-

teroperability (FEI). The review of the different as-

pects and the frameworks coverage of these frame-

works lead to identify the main elements in EI context

(i.e. (a) the three interoperability aspects: conceptual,

technical and organisational, (b) four concerns of EI:

business, process, service and data); however, none

of the EI frameworks deﬁnes interoperability, or pro-

poses to improve it.

2.2 Ontology of Enterprise

Interoperability (OoEI)

The OoEI aims at formally deﬁning Enterprise Inter-

operability (EI) while providing a framework to de-

scribe problems and related solutions pertaining to the

interoperability domain. Figure 1 gives an extract of

the OoEI meta-model. Interoperability concerns, de-

ﬁne the content of interoperation that may take place

at various levels of the enterprise (data, service, pro-

cess, business). Interoperability barriers identify var-

ious obstacles to interoperability in three categories

(conceptual, technological, and organizational).More

details can be found in (Gu

edria, 2012).

2.3 Maturity Model for Enterprise

Interoperability (MMEI)

A maturity model is a framework that describes for a

speciﬁc area of interest a number of levels of sophis-

tication at which activities in this area can be carried

out (Alonso et al., 2010). In our case, the speciﬁc area

of interest is EI. EI maturity can be measured in two

ways: a priori where the measure relates to the po-

tentiality of a system to be interoperable with a possi-

ble future partner whose identity is not known at the

moment of evaluation, a posteriori where the mea-

sure relates to the compatibility measure between two

(or more) known systems willing to interoperate. De-

veloping interoperability can induce many problems

that have to be solved in order to achieve targeted ob-

jectives. Solving these problems may be a long it-

erative procedure which can fail due to the lack of

a consensus between partners or the high cost of the

solution applicability. Preventing and solving inter-

operability problems before they occur is simpler and

usually less costly than developing corrective actions.

Within this context, a priori assessment deserves par-

ticular attention in order to help enterprises knowing

their strengths and weaknesses in terms of interoper-

ability and undertaking improvement actions. Many

maturity models have been developed in the literature.

Among them, we ﬁnd the Maturity Model for Enter-

prise Interoperability (MMEI) which is the only one

deﬁned within an a priori context of interoperability.

A review and a comparison of them could be found in

(Ford, 2008), (Gu

edria et al., 2008), (Gu

edria, 2012).

MMEI (Gu

edria et al., 2013) allows companies to

evaluate their potentiality to interoperate, in order to

know the probability that they have to support efﬁ-

cient interoperation and to detect precisely the weak-

nesses that are sources of interoperability problems.

Moreover, MMEI differs from all other maturity mod-

els dedicated to interoperability so far. It is intended

to cover the three interoperability levels (conceptual,

technological, and organizational) at each of the EI

concerns (business, process, service, data), as de-

ﬁned in the Framework for Enterprise Interoperabil-

ity (FEI) (Chen, 2006). MMEI deﬁnes ﬁve levels of

interoperability maturity (Gu

edria et al., 2013). A

general view of the MMEI model with its contents

is given by Table 1. Each one of the maturity levels is

an instantiation of this general view with an evolution

of the content regarding the evolution of the level.

3 INTEGRATED MODEL

In this section, we propose to deﬁne an integrated

model allowing improving EI while sharing a com-

mon understanding of it. This integrated model comes

in response to a research gap that we have been identi-

ﬁed when reviewing the interoperability related work

in the previous section. Indeed, each one of the pre-

sented interoperability frameworks and models has a

unique purpose as presented in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Enterprise Interoperability Frameworks and Pur-

poses.

Towards an Integrated Model for Enterprise Interoperability

197

Figure 1: Extract of the OoEI.

Table 1: General view of MMEI levels structure.

Conceptual Technological Organizational

Business Business models, en-

terprise visions, strate-

gies, objectives, poli-

cies

Infrastructure, technol-

ogy

Work methods, busi-

ness rules, and organi-

zational structure

Process Processes models Tools supporting pro-

cesses modeling and

execution

Responsibilities, Pro-

cess management and

rules

Service Services models Tools supporting ser-

vices and applications

Responsibilities, ser-

vice and application

management and rules

Data Data models, (seman-

tic, syntax)

Data storage and ex-

change devices

Responsibilities, data

management and rules

To deal with this gap, this section proposes to de-

ﬁne the integrated model based on the OoEI and the

MMEI models.

The integration of the MMEI and OoEI will al-

low the enrichment of the OoEI with concepts and de-

tails from the MMEI, allowing the enterprise to better

diagnose its interoperability problems and ﬁnd suit-

able solutions. On the other hand the OoEI contains

a considerable knowledge that may help the MMEI

assessing the Interoperability readiness of a given en-

terprise.

The structure of MMEI is based on a simpliﬁed

version of FEI where we can ﬁnd the EI concerns

(i.e. Business, process, service and data) and interop-

erability barriers (i.e. conceptual, technological and

organizational), as depicted by table 1. These con-

cepts can also be found in the OoEI (Naudet et al.,

2008).

Moreover MMEI and OoEI follow a systemic

view (Von Bertalanffy, 1968), where an enterprise is

seen as a complex system. The content of each cell of

the table 1 can be related to the OoEI. Figure 3 shows

how these cells can be related to the OoEI. The OoEI

concepts are presented with white ellipses while con-

cepts related to the MMEI model are presented with

gray color.

Based on the OoEI and MMEI review, three main

dimensions of EI are considered: Interoperability as-

pects (conceptual, organizational and technical), EI

concerns (business, process, service and data) and

Interoperability barriers (Conceptual, Organizational,

and Technological). These are represented by the con-

cepts: InteroperabilityAspect, InteroperabilityCon-

cern and InteroperabilityBarrier respectively. These

are all modeled with their different constituents rep-

resented here as dimensions describing Enterprise In-

teroperability, as shown in ﬁgure 3.

Within the context of EI, interoperability prob-

lems are represented by the InteroperabilityBarrier

concept. The term barrier is deﬁned as an incom-

patibility, obstructing the sharing of information and

preventing exchanging services (Chen et al., 2006).

Fourth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design

198

Figure 3: Extract of the integrated model.

The establishment of interoperability (with its three

aspects) consists of removing identiﬁed barriers (con-

ceptual barrier, organizational barrier or/and techno-

logical barrier). Hence each InteroperabilityBarrier

is related to the corresponding InteroperabilityAspect

(see ﬁgure 3).

For each OrgaizationalBarrier, the criteria that

need to be veriﬁed are the deﬁnition and compatibil-

ity of the Responsibilities, Work methods, Business

rules, Organization structure and strategy, as deﬁned

by the MMEI model (see table 1). This is repre-

sented by the concepts Responsibilities, Work meth-

ods, Business rules, Organization structure and strat-

egy which are considered by the Organizational Bar-

rier. Similarly, the concepts of Business model, Pro-

cess model, Service model and Data model are con-

cerned with the ConceptualBarrier and the concepts

of IT infrastructure, IT tools supporting data storage

and Exchange devices are concerned with the Tech-

nologicalBarrier.

This model can be used thereafter to have the re-

quired knowledge to assess the EI of the considered

enterprise. The gray MMEI concepts (gray ellipses)

in the ﬁgure 3 presents the requirements and related

information that need to be veriﬁed. For example, in

order to assess the EI at organizational level, some

of the requirements that assessors have to verify are

whether responsibilities supporting business, process,

service and data interoperability concerns are prop-

erly deﬁned and that are compatible with those used

within the enterprise environment.

4 ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE

To better understand the application and the use of

the above deﬁned conceptual framework, it is inter-

esting to check its utility by an illustrative example.

A potential interoperability problem exists if the con-

Towards an Integrated Model for Enterprise Interoperability

199

sidered enterprise, say E has no deﬁned models, tools,

rules, etc. or that it uses incompatible ones with those

used in its environment (including its partners, clients,

providers, etc.). For example, if E adopts 50 hours of

employment per week while being situated in France

or Luxembourg, this will create incompatibility with

the environment of the enterprise where a maximum

of 40 hours is ﬁxed for the employment. Figure 4

illustrates this interoperability problem that can be

detected when assessing the interoperability of E to-

wards unknown partner.

Figure 4: Illustrative Example with the enterprise E.

Figure 5: Illustrative Example with enterprises E1 and E2.

Suppose now that a particular interoperability

project starts (i.e. the partner is known but the in-

teroperations haven’t started yet), barriers to interop-

erability can exist at each level of the company and of

its partner. An interoperability problem exists if the

two companies have different strategies. For example,

one of the company, say E1 adopts a Low cost strategy

which focuses on producing the product by lowering

costs and maximizing income (by increasing volume),

while E2 is adopting a differentiation strategy which

focuses on producing different products (better) than

those of competitors. Differentiation usually includes

the processes for taking your product directly to con-

sumers. So processing and marketing are involved.

Differentiation in small markets often involves creat-

ing a personal relationship with consumers. An appli-

cation of the deﬁned conceptual model is presented in

ﬁgure 5.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we have proposed an integrated model

based on the Maturity Model of Enterprise Interop-

erability (MMEI) and the ontology of Enterprise In-

teroperability (OoEI) concepts. The integration was

facilitated by the common basis of the two models

(systemics) and the use of the Framework of Enter-

prise Interoperability (FEI) by both of them. The

integrated model allows having the required knowl-

edge for the interoperability assessment and save hu-

man efforts in gathering information and validating it

for each assessment. The interoperability assessment

based on the integrated model allows diagnosing in-

teroperability problems. This is facilitated by the na-

ture of the OoEI which were conceived in a problem

solving perspective. Future work are planned to im-

prove this ﬁrst version of the integrated model in or-

der to implement an automatic assessment tool. The

idea is to develop an ontology-based software infras-

tructure for web-based self-evaluation for enterprise

interoperability. This tool will help to diagnose in-

teroperability problems. This can be complemented

by proposing solutions to interoperability problems,

using best practices that have been developed for the

MMEI (Gu

edria, 2012).

REFERENCES

Alonso, J., de Soria, I. M., Orue-Echevarria, L., and Ver-

gara, M. (2010). Enterprise collaboration maturity

model (ecmm): preliminary deﬁnition and future chal-

lenges. In Enterprise Interoperability IV, pages 429–

438. Springer.

Chen, D. (2006). Enterprise interoperability framework. In

EMOI-INTEROP.

Chen, D., Daclin, N., et al. (2006). Framework for en-

terprise interoperability. In Proc. of IFAC Workshop

EI2N, pages 77–88.

Chen, D., Doumeingts, G., and Vernadat, F. (2008). Archi-

tectures for enterprise integration and interoperabil-

ity: Past, present and future. Computers in industry,

59(7):647–659.

CompTIA (2004). European interoperability framework -

ict industry recommendations. White paper, Comp-

TIA, Brussels.

Fourth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design

200

Ford, T. (2008). Measuring System Interoperability: An i-

Score Improvement. Proceedings of the 6th Annual

Conference on Systems Engineering Research.

edria, W. (Bordeaux, France, 2012). A Contribution

to Enterprise Interoperability Maturity Assessment.

Ph.D. thesis, University of Bordeaux1.

edria, W., Naudet, Y., and Chen, D. (2008). Interoper-

ability maturity models–survey and comparison–. In

On the move to meaningful Internet systems: OTM

2008 Workshops, pages 273–282. Springer.

edria, W., Naudet, Y., and Chen, D. (2013). Maturity

model for enterprise interoperability. Enterprise In-

formation Systems, (ahead-of-print):1–28.

IEEE (1990). IEEE standard computer dictionary: A com-

pilation of ieee standard computer glossaries. Insti-

tute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Naudet, Y., Latour, T., and D.Chen (2008). A systemic ap-

proach to interoperability formalization. In IFAC08

workshops.

NEHTA (2005). Towards an interoperability framework,

version 1.8. White paper, National E-Health Transi-

tion Authority, Australia.

Proper, E. (2008). Enterprise Architecture: Creating Value

by Informed Governance. Springer.

Ruggaber, R. (2006). Athena-advanced technologies for

interoperability of heterogeneous enterprise networks

and their applications. Interoperability of enterprise

software and applications, pages 459–460.

Von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory:

Foundations, Development, Applications. Georges

Braziller, Inc., New York, USA.

Towards an Integrated Model for Enterprise Interoperability

201