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Astract: The electronic exchange of business documents is an often communicated desire by enterprises and the public sector. Electronic business is currently mainly hindered by unresolved interoperability issues and a lack of tool support. Additionally, computer aided document exchange is cost intensive at the beginning and thus discourages small and medium-sized companies to adapt to new technologies. The contribution of this paper is to present suitable tool support and methods to manage the complexity of business document integration. Our modeling tool is based on UN/CEFACT's (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Core Components Technical Specification allowing for platform independent, conceptual business document models. On these models further integration operations can be performed.

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Astract: Workflow technology promises an increase in efficiency in the execution of business processes. The technology is widely accepted, but often the high costs exceed the promised benefits. Thus, it is desirable to calculate the profitability prior to investing into workflow technology. After an investment into workflow management systems (WFMS), it has to be verified whether the expected benefits have been realized or not. In this paper we present a method that covers both, the cost-benefit-ratio calculations specially customized for WFMS and the calculation of the realized savings. The profitability analysis is based on simple measurable performance indicators that consider the tangible calculation of costs as well as the quantitative and qualitative benefits. Long time practical experience in implementing and operating workflow management supported the design of the method. The method presented in this paper has been successfully used in the IT company of a banking corporation.

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Astract: In 1999 UN/CEFACT and OASIS started the ebXML Initiative which delivered its first set of specifications 2 years later. This book chapter discusses the goals and the results of ebXML. The core of the book chapter addresses a critical evaluation of ebXML. It discusses why ebXML was succesful in some parts, but failed in market acceptance for major parts.

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

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Astract: Shorter life cycles of products and services require faster changing business models. Information systems must quickly adjust to the adapted business models. Business models are usually described by their own proprietary notation, which is incompatible with UML - the de-facto modeling standard in software engineering. In order to allow a straight-through modeling approach from business models over business process models to software artifacts, it is desirable to use a common modeling approach. Thus, we suggest to map existing concepts to describe business models onto the UML notation. In our work we mainly focus on inter-organizational systems. A promising approach describing a business model for an inter-organizational network of actors is delivered by e3-Value. In this paper, we present a discussion of different approaches to represent the e3-Value concepts by means of UML. A UML notation for e3-Value is a precondition to future work on aligning e3-Value to UML-based approaches specifying inter-organizational business processes.