Effects of Enterprise Interoperability on Integration Efforts in Supply Chains
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
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One important trend in enterprise-scale IT has beenthe increasing use of business-to-business integration(B2Bi) technologies to automate business processes thatcross organisational boundaries, such as the interactionsbetween partner companies along a supply chain. It isrelatively easy to describe a pattern of interaction, orchoreography, in the case where everything proceedssmoothly. However, the abnormal cases, such as where aprocess fails or a message is lost, are much morecomplicated, and risk introducing data and processinconsistencies into computer-based systems. CurrentB2Bi technologies do not supply an infrastructure thatcan provide reliability without considerablesophistication from the architects and developers As afirst step towards guiding architects to the design of B2Bisystems that maintain consistency despite failures, thispaper describes a variety of types of failure that can arisein practice, based on a realistic e-procurement scenario.We describe these failures in terms of the different typesof state that naturally occur within the distributed system.Understanding the types of failure that need to behandled, or prevented, is essential to an architect ordeveloper who must design and write handlers for all theexceptions that can occur in their workflows.