Developing a Reference Architecture for Inter-Organizational Collaboration Setup Systems

The question of how a service consumer and a service provider should collaborate with each other in a business-to-business (B2B) setting is an ongoing research issue. The concept of electronic Sourcing (eSourcing) has been proposed as an integral concept with the EU research project CrossWork. The properties of eSourcing are explored, however, the question arises how a service consumer and a provider need to interact with each other during setup time for establishing an eSourcing configuration? The concept of eSourcing offers more flexibility than other approaches in that respect. Thus, this paper investigates the characteristics of interaction between a service consumer and provider during setup time for establishing an enactable B2B collaboration. These characteristics are employed to discover interaction patterns in a dop-down way that are exemplified for the concept of eSourcing. As such, the discovered patterns form the basis for the design of a reference architecture that serves as a foundation for the design of e-collaboration setup systems.