Business collaboration development : a case study in capital market

Nowadays in order to stay competitive, business needs to collaborate with each other to offer value added services. Collaborative business process development require loose coupling between individual business processes so that they can interoperate freely across the Internet and that the collaboration can be established in a highly dynamic fashion and on-demand basis. Service oriented computing (SOC) is able to meet such request by establishing business collaboration (BC) to utilize business processes (BPs) crossing organizational boundaries. BP is organizational based, which is about one organization composing services; while BC is choreographically based, which is about cooperation between organizations by linking their BPs. A successful BC development needs to follow the chorographical requirement to ensure the consistency among individual BPs across organizations. It also needs to meet the organizational requirements to ensure each organization's BP performs according to its business rules and conforms to what is specified from collaboration point of view. The current Web services (WS) technologies have provided specifications and tools for BC development. However methodologies, and real case study and experience report in BC development is lacking in the literature. In this paper a business collaboration framework (BCF) is proposed which breaks the BC requirements into 3 layers, each of which models different aspect in the BC development. Practical experience and issues on how to use the BCF is presented and discussed in a case study developing BC in capital marketplace (CM), a project sponsored by the Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre (CMCRC).4 page(s