Anatomy of Business Networks: Future Internet Enterprise Systems Accelerating Procurement Interoperability

Large Business Networks impose interoperability challenges on Enterprise Systems in the form of ERP and extended ERP, involving many organizations and people. First, the classic document exchange based system connection approach across company borderlines is time-consuming and costly. Second, today’s enterprise systems lack support of the people dimension with specific focus on enabling semi-structured and unstructured activities as part of the entire end-to-end-process. In this paper we present our research-in-progress of a running design science research project focusing on creating a software artifact that addresses the two challenges of significant integration effort and the lack of semi-structured and unstructured process support. We look at these two challenges specifically in the domain of procurement, where many connections between business partner result in high integration effort and involves a large number of semi-structured and unstructured activities