Modeling Business Transactions as e-Services

E-services wrap an organization’s information system and provide a standard interface that enables cooperation with other information systems. As a consequence, e-services should embed the inter-organizational coordination mechanisms that enact cooperation. Inter-organizational cooperation can be ruled by a continuum of coordination mechanisms between markets and hierarchies. The goal of this paper is to describe a methodological approach for the specification of e-services which is grounded on a taxonomy of interorganizational coordination mechanisms. The paper posits that the IS literature highlights fundamental aspects of inter-organizational coordination that need to be represented to support cooperation through e-services. Accordingly, the design of e-services is based on a taxonomy of inter-organizational coordination mechanisms. The methodology helps transform this taxonomy of interorganizational coordination mechanisms into high-level reusable patterns of cooperation based on e-services. In turn, these high-level patterns are translated into a technical specification based on the WSDL, WSCL and WSFL languages. The application of the methodology to the case of an Italian industrial district provides a preliminary empirical verification of the methodology.