Enabling Business Interoperability: A Service Co-Creation Viewpoint

Abstract

As escalating business demands push beyond the technology limits and towards leveraging the business value of enterprise interoperability (EI), strategic usage and provision of EI solutions is no longer a matter of providing a fixed set of proprietary software applications. At the same time, however, the question for many service providers is how much value is there, beyond the conceptual benefits; in particular, how can interoperability contribute to companies’ competitiveness, in what areas, and how. This challenge motivated our research in which we explore the development of a practical framework that helps organizations: a) assess their maturity level for engaging in value co-creation opportunities, and b) select the right starting point for developing EI solutions. The significance of this work is three-fold. First, it combines theoretical concepts of EI and Resource Based Theory in order to offer a theoretically grounded framework. Second, it provides a practical framework for meticulously unfolding management and/or organizational challenges in the early phases of a service lifecycle for risk mitigation. Third, it is a first version of a design artefact that will be applied in a real-world context to evaluate its utility in further research. Towards this direction, and as a running example, we used a realistic scenario from the B2B IT outsourcing domain, depicted with the e3 ontology tool.