Inter-company integration of application systems – a survey of developmentmethodologies

When designing business-to-business processes, integrating application systems acrosscompany borders is a crucial success factor. This specific kind of integration requires anarchitecture for coupling the involved application systems. Nowadays, numerous platformsare available to serve as foundation for the development of coupling architectures. The highcomplexity of typical couplings requires approaches that go beyond the scope of architectureand consider modelling and procedural aspects as well. They represent comprehensivedevelopment methodologies. This article presents a framework, which allows to summarisethe basic aspects of such approaches. It describes four approaches with respect to thatframework.[...]