Overview of current efforts to establish application level standards for e-business

For many companies, electronic business is an opportunity they must not miss in order to stay competitive. Especially "business-to-business" solutions require well integrated cross-enterprise business processes. This in turn requires mutual agreements about common models to do business, about the relevant terminology, and last but nor least about interfaces that allow for the automatic interchange of business data between corporate application systems. For these infrastructures to be open for a wide range of potential suppliers, customers and partners, the required agreements should be part of reliable standards. However, specifying and eventually certifying a standard is not enough. It is essential to help companies with planning and managing the migration process. In recent years a number of initiatives has been established to address this challenge. Some of them aim at the specification of interfaces for data exchange only, others also include business models and guidelines to structure migration processes. This paper gives an overview and a brief evaluation of eight selected standardisation efforts: BMEcat, Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR), xCBL, cXML, ebXML, Open Application Integration Specification (OAGIS), Open Buying on the Internet (OBI), RosettaNet.