Standardization in Enterprise Inter- and Intraorganizational Integration

The worldwide collaboration and cooperation of enterprises of all sizes have increased the need for interoperability standards, especially for businesses in global environments. Such standards are concerned with the communication aspects of information and communication technology (ICT), such as protocols, safety, and security, as well as the syntax and semantics of the communication content. Sender and receiver must be able to trust both the communication and the validity of its content. Both parties have to have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information. Unfortunately, the standards are developed independently by different standards organizations using incompatible and inconsistent terminology, thereby hampering significantly the deployment of existing standards and the development of still missing ones. The paper presents existing standards in the area of enterprise inter- and intraorganizational integration and identifies shortcomings in the current standards, especially problems in the area of terminology.