Architecting adaptive inter-organizational middleware systems: A proposal, implementation, and evaluation

Abstract

Business-to-Business (B2B) relationships have long relied on integration of partner's processes as a means to create seamless, efficient, and effective end-to-end business processes. Inter-Organizational Information Systems (IOIS) have largely been endorsed as B2B enablers, and their middleware components have become critical in integrating processes throughout heterogeneous systems from different partners. These middleware components are referred to as Inter-Organizational Middleware Systems (IOMS). While IOIS can be presented as automated Information Systems spanning across partnering organizations aiming to synergize their forces and increase their competitiveness and cost efficiency, IOMS are the components inside IOIS that are responsible for the actual bridging of various partners' systems while also holding business intelligence. Being a relatively new concept, IOMS lacks research and standardization, but also acknowledgment from stakeholders that it is an independent concept, and as such requiring its own architecture. Instead of the existing chaotic, costly, and passive approach to architecting IOMS, we propose a tailored adaptive architecture we named Adaptive Inter-Organizational Middleware (AIM) architecture. First, the notions of frameworks and architectures are presented, with a focus on the enterprise context. Then, different approaches to IOIS architecture and processes management are analyzed. Zooming onto the IOMS component, the need for IOMS-specific architectures is discussed, and AIM is subsequently proposed as an effort to answer this need. The architecture is then evaluated via an implementation in a large multinational operating within a complex IOIS, before its merits and limitations are discussed.