A Survey of B2B Methodologies and Technologies: From Business Models towards Deployment Artifacts

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and service-based information exchange can be observed. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise. On a technical level, the focus in software development is moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These transitions on both levels promise a market entry at lower costs and an easier adjustment to changing market conditions. Hence, an overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches emerged in the past targeting the area of B2B - these are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper, we provide a survey of the most promising ones at both levels and classify them using the open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Furthermore, we discuss how individual specifications on different levels fit together - starting from business models via business processes to artifacts ready for deployment