INTEROPERABILITY CHALLENGES IN NEW MEMBER

STATES SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES REQUIRE

SUITABLE EAI ARCHITECTURES

Karsten Tolle

Universität Frankfurt am Main - DBIS, Robert-Mayer-Str. 11-15, Frankfurt am Main, 60325, Germany

Valentinas Kiauleikis

KAUNAS University of Technology, Department of Computer Engineering, KTU, Studentu 50-215, LT-51368, Lithuania

Gerald Knoll

Fraunhofer IPA, Nobelstr. 12, Stuttgart, 70569, Germany

Claudia Guglielmina, Alessandra Arezza

TXT e-solutions, Via Frigia, 27, 20126 Milano, Italy

Keywords: E-business, Universal Business Language (UBL), New Member States, Federated Integration, Enterprise

Service Bus (ESB).

Abstract: Taking Lithuania as an example, we mention and explain the main barriers for interoperability between

different SME’s. There are barriers valid for any SME and other barriers that are special for Lithuania and

other New Member States. Inside this document we explain how we address these barriers with

technologies like UBL and by different modules and their interplay; building a federated integration

approach. As underlying technology to link these modules we are using an Enterprise Service Bus. Special

to our solution is that human activities are supported by the modules during the B2B process in such a way

that there is still enough freedom for them to interact directly with other trading partners, e.g. via phone,

without messing up the process.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the last 2-3 years, the European Union has

performed its biggest enlargement ever, in terms of

scope and diversity. Since 1st May 2004, Cyprus,

Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,

Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia

joined the European Union (EU), raising the total

number of Member States to 25. In January 2007

Romania and Bulgaria joined too and further

acceding countries will follow.

From an IT and economy perspective those

countries are mainly based on Small and Medium

Enterprises (SME’s) without extensive IT

infrastructure and experience. Strengthen their

position and helping them to integrate into existing

IT infrastructure would have a very high beneficial

impact on European economy.

Our work concentrates on the integration

between SME’s taking the special situations and

needs of less developed and new member states into

account. As one example we choose Lithuania to

describe existing barriers and problems (see section

2). Nevertheless, we believe that our ideas and

solutions are also applicable to other states.

Section 3 of this paper describes our proposals to

address and reduce the mentioned barriers. These

proposals will be tested and according tools are

developed within the EU project ABILITIES

257

Tolle K., Kiauleikis V., Knoll G., Guglielmina C. and Arezza A. (2007).

INTEROPERABILITY CHALLENGES IN NEW MEMBER STATES SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES REQUIRE SUITABLE EAI ARCHITECTURES.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 257-260

DOI: 10.5220/0002350602570260

 SciTePress

(Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged

Europe SMEs). In this paper we concentrate on

specific modules and functionalities to underline our

ideas. A more general presentation of ABILITIES

architecture can be found in (Bagnato et al, 2006).

2 BUSINESS IN LITHUANIA

As an introduction to the interoperability challenges,

the test case for Retail in Lithuania will be

elaborated in more detail. But, let us start with its

special situation: For Lithuania as for other east

europe countries, you need to remember that the

shift from Soviet System to an independent

Lithuania is just 16 years ago. Changing a system

does not change the people and their habits from one

day to another. Nowadays small and medium

business in Lithuania can be characterized as

follows:

1. A significant number of business people are

opening Lithuanian market towards both

Eastern countries and enlarged European Union

markets.

2. Enterprises in their everyday life accept only

profitable activities, but

3. Enterprises are ready to invest into information

technologies, if they can see obvious profits.

The first point is due to its location and to old

still existing relationships. Lithuania and similar

countries therefore can play the important role of a

stepping stone or mediator to combine European

Union markets with Eastern countries, like Russia.

The second point is due to the evolutionary effect

that took place the last years since having an

independent market, where many businessmen failed

or learned hard lessons. However, Lithuanian

businessmen are aware that they have backlog

demands regarding IT and they need to speed up to

include it into there daily work, if they want to

compete on bigger markets, as mentioned in point 3.

2.1 Potential

Lithuania shows a very high potential for IT

investments. For example in 2006 within the

manufacturing and supply sector 84,6% of the

enterprises where connected to the internet. The

network of internet centres is well spread over the

whole country. The same is true for the private

sector Lithuania (30%) overtakes EU countries such

as Greece (18%), Czech (26%), Cyprus (26%), Italy

(28%), Portugal (28%), Poland (29%) and stand near

Ireland (31%) and Hungary (34%) in respect to

internet connections. Lithuania even has the largest

penetration of mobile connections (138,53%) of the

world (by the data of international

telecommunication market research agency

“Informa Telecoms & Media” in December of

2005). This demonstrates that Lithuanian inhabitants

are willing to adopt and deal with new technologies

and it is only a question of time until the gap of not

existing skilled personal will be closed.

2.2 Barriers

When we talk about barriers related to introduce IT

to support interoperability between SME’s, there are

some very common, addressing nearly all SME’s in

the word and some are special to certain

circumstances. Let us start with the common ones:

1. Understanding the current Business Processes –

to introduce a new IT system the existing

processes need to be understood and mapped.

For SME’s it is not obvious that the BP is

already drawn somewhere using UML or

similar technologies. For SME managers it is

complicated to bridge the language gap

(business terms and thinking versa IT terms and

thinking) between them and IT specialists.

2. Change of current Business Processes –

introducing or changing the IT system most

times causes a change of the normal or used

way to perform business and to some extend

this is intended and should result into a benefit.

However, many big project failed because users

(employees) where not able to cope with these

changes. Already the change of the graphical

user interface bothers and annoys them.

3. Need for barging – SMEs’ need to be

competitive against big companies. Many times

this is achieved by supporting special customer

needs by customized products or special

services. Therefore, prices, product and delivery

details are more common to be under

negotiation.

4. Maintain and understand the technology – be

aware of all technology you rely on and that can

not be changed easily is a difficult task not only

for SME’s. For SME’s this is even more

complicated as they have limited skilled

personnel working for them.

5. Usefulness for the collaboration – when talking

about an collaborative IT system that should

connect SME’s, it only makes sense if a critical

number of partners are using the same system to

receive according benefit out of the investment.

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Of course there are additional common barriers.

Unfortunately, we can only list the most important

ones here. Other barriers are special or at least have

a special importance in case of Lithuania:

6. Language – Lithuania is a small country and

surrounded by a number of others with very

different languages. It is very difficult to find

appropriate ways to communicate, especially

because English, as a common intermediate

language, is not so common due to the old

times.

7. Law – for the same reason (small country) the

different laws of various countries influence the

trade. Due to the young democracies these laws

are still subject of major changes. On top the

rules provided by government are sometimes

hinder IT solutions with electronic document

versions.

3 HOW TO REDUCE THE

BARRIERS?

In our work we concentrate on the interoperability

between two enterprises (B2B) and not within

subsystems of one company. More precisely we

want to reduce the effort needed to perform the core

business transactions like order or invoice.

To do so, we think of a system that connects the

different enterprises with each other and serves as a

trustworthy mediator. From technology point of

view our solution is based on an Enterprise Service

Bus (ESB) where various modules are plugged-in to

support the needed functionalities. A more detailed

overview can be found at (Bagnato et al, 2006). This

system is meant to be provided by a service

provider, who maintains the system (barrier 4) and

supports SME’s in connecting their business to the

platform. Additionally, it will be also the duty of the

service provider during the build up phase to

convince enough relevant SME’s to join the

platform and to address barrier 5.

As a common starting point to exchange

documents we rely on the Universal Business

Language (UBL). UBL is an international, royalty-

free standard for business document patterns in

XML, managed by the Organization for the

Advancement of Structured Information Standards

(OASIS). Version 2.0 was approved as official

OASIS Standard in December 2006. To some extend

one can compare UBL with HTML in the sense of

being a common, low-level understandable

language. The advantage of UBL compared to other

approaches, e.g. EDIFACT, is the possibility to

customize the messages according given

requirements. On top the UBL Technical Committee

(UBL TC) encourages people to work on

localizations for different countries to provide

translations and to list country specific requirements

and constraints for validation.

By the flexibility of UBL documents we can

already address barriers 6 (Language) and 7 (Law)

we pointed out in the previous section as barriers. Of

course this customization of UBL documents needs

to be supported by appropriate tools. In fact those

two points probably are only needed once for each

country (and potentially slight changes are needed

for specific domains). Therefore, this should be done

by the service provider and it should not bother

SME’s too much.

In addition the flexibility of the documents can

be used to customize the documents according

special needs of each SME separately. This will

make it easier to connect to existing legacy systems

and the service provider can support these steps

without demanding a full understanding of the

underlying software. This also reduces the visible

change for employees of the SME, who will remain

working on their old system (addressing barrier 2).

However, slight changes of the business process

will occur and where these changes are planned this

hopefully results into an improvement. To do so, the

current BP needs to be understood and build into the

system. We generated a module, called Process

Designer, to address this. Here the SME manager

can draw their processes using a graphical

representation similar to BPMN (simplified and

more intuitive). Instead of drawing the complete

cycle, he only needs to deal with small, hand able

steps of the overall process and being supported by

the service provider. This way we address barrier 1.

What remains is barrier 3 “Need for bargaining”.

To address this we developed three different

modules focussing on different issues. Our central

hypothesis here: There will be no system in near

future for this task being flexible and intelligent

enough to be as efficient as humans. On top the

decisions will need to be done by humans anyway.

However, support the human being with tools will

increase his efficiency. Our tools therefore target:

1. Multimedia support linked or attached to the

exchanged documents;

2. Supporting human to human interactions by

the system;

3. Reducing barging process by a built in

negotiation system.

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The first two are similar in the sense that we try

to include the human being into the system.

Multimedia resources are mend to be processed by

humans. There are cases a picture or voice stream

can easily express the needs and in a way that can be

easily understood by the receiving party. You can

think of this as an offline communication that goes

thru the system and will be documented.

The second module handles communications that

are online and do not directly go through the system.

However, the system will be aware that the

communication took place and minutes can be

placed, so, the results are visible (at least to

humans). These two issues reflect our idea that on

one hand side the system should be used as much as

possible but on the other side to allow users to

bypass the system in cases this is more efficient

without breaking everything up (Pataki et al, 2007).

Last but not least we developed a negotiation

system. Here the SME managers can define rules he

wants to apply depending on certain circumstances.

The most common example is a huge order beyond a

given threshold. In this case a predefined allowance

is granted. This rule can even be visible to

customers. By being aware of the rule the customers

might be motivated to order at least the amount

needed to reach the threshold.

Instead of changing directly the values, e.g. total

price, UBL has build in elements to handle

allowances or extra charges. Using these elements

provides better understanding for calculating end

prices and provides the possibility to track back the

applied rules.

Of course also the customer SME can have his

rules and without any IT support which results into a

loop of phone calls affecting even different persons.

We do not say that the negotiation system will do

everything automatically and will replace every

phone call. However, reducing the number of loops

within the barging process is already a benefit.

Think of the system as being a mediator helping

them to find together.

4 RELATED WORK AND

CONCLUSIONS

With the approval of UBL 2.0 by OASIS and

statements of UN/CEFACT to relay on UBL in case

of providing a similar standard (McGrath, 2006),

UBL was pushed and we expect a high acceptance

of this standard. In Europe UBL is already used for

e-invoicing for the Danish government since 2005.

The EU project GENESIS (GENESIS, 2006) is

more related to eGovernment. However, after the

great success in Denmark the plans are to extend it

and provide also for SME’s an appropriate platform

and services called OIO Service Oriented

Infrastructure (Brun, Lanng, 2006). Due to the open

architecture this approach is more flexible.

However, we believe that with our single service

provider platform based on an ESB solutions will be

easier and quicker to be reached.

With the described modules in section 3, especially

with respect to barging and negotiation, we try to

support SME’s without ruling them down. Our

approach is not “all or nothing” instead the platform

supports human-to-human communication when

needed and this way following a more federated

integration approach. Our modules and ideas where

generated together with SME managers and

therefore will hopefully meet their requirements.

However, ABILITIES is still a running project and

final results how SME’s adopted the overall

platform are still under evaluation. They are

expected by end of 2007.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work presented in this paper is partly funded by

the European Commission through the ABILITIES

STREP. The authors are solely responsible for the

paper's content.

REFERENCES

Bagnato, A., Guglielmina, C., Knoll, G., Tolle, K., 2006.

Federated Message-based Architecture for eBusiness

Interoperability in New Member States SMEs.

eChallenges 2006, Barcelona, Spain

Brun, M. H., Lanng, C., 2006. Reducing barriers for e-

business in SME’s through an open service oriented

infrastructure, ICEC’06, Fredericton, Canada

GENESIS: Enterprise Application Interoperability –

Integration for SMEs, Governmental Organizations

and Intermediaries in the New European Union,

http://www.genesis-ist.eu, EU Project, started 2006

McGrath, T., 2006. UBL and UN/CEFACT a status report,

presentation held at UBL International 2006,

Copenhagen, Denmark

Pataki, B. E., Kovács, L., Guglielmina, C., Arezza, A.,

2007. ABILITIES to Support a Federated Architecture

Based Interoperability Bus with Groupware &

Multimedia, I-ESA 2007, Funchial, Portugal

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