Inter-organisational collaborations supported by e-contracts

This paper presents a model for describing inter-organizational collaborations for e-commerce, e-government and e-business applications. The model, referred to as a community model, takes into account internal organizational rules and business policies as typically stated in business contracts that govern cross-collaborations. The model can support the development of a new generation of contract management systems that provide true inter-organizational collaboration capabilities to all parties involved in contract management. This includes contract monitoring features and dynamic updates to the processes and policies associated with contracts. We present a blueprint architecture for inter-organizational contract management and a contract language based on the community model. This language can be used to specialize this architecture for concrete collaborative structures and business processes.