Service-oriented business to business integration: A systematic literature analysis

Business automation continues to be a strategic target for IT investment. However, business automation involves inherent challenges, such as system integration issues. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and business-to-business (B2B) integration standards are two approaches used for creating business automation solutions. In this paper a systematic literature analysis is conducted to explore the integration concepts in these two approaches. The objective of the study is to characterize the integration issues in these approaches, and to synthesize the findings into characteristics of so called service-oriented B2B integration. From the literature it is concluded that the SOA approach emphasizes support for dynamic business processes within an enterprise, while the B2B standards approach focuses on pre-defined semantic descriptions of business data that is exchanged between business partners. Thus, a service-oriented B2B integration environment is conceptualized where the B2B standards are used to strengthen the semantic interoperability, while dynamic business process implementations are enabled through the SOA approach.