Today, enterprises face rapidly changing market conditions, new competitive pressures, new regulatory fiats that demand compliance, and new competitive threats. To cope with these business conditions, enterprises migrate to inter-organizational relationships as a way to adapt to their new environment, increase their efficiency, and gain competitive advantages. Suitable enterprise collaboration that fits with these large inter-organizations requires a high level and important change. It is clear that on demand enterprise collaboration drives the needs for the IT infrastructure to respond quickly, and support new business models instantaneously. Flexibility, adaptability and modularity features are the main characteristics of the target architecture. However, enterprise information systems were not designed to evolve with this new way of thinking. This adds another level of intricacy to an already complex IT infrastructure For this reason, building effective enterprise collaboration is not an easy task: it requires a new generation of IT architecture with more agility, flexibility and modularity. A contemporary approach for addressing these critical issues is the Service Oriented architecture (SOA). Nowadays, SOA becomes the most promising paradigm for leveraging enterprise information systems. It creates opportunities for enterprises to provide value added service. Usually, this paradigm models business activities as a collection of self-contained services available across the enterprise and can be used through standard protocols internally and externally. Although the hype surrounding SOA is widespread, the concept is still in its infancy with regards to actual implementations. Several problems have arisen. Issues like the lack of precise definitions for the SOA concepts involved and the enormous demand for process guidance and proven best practices in these projects are among the most frequently discussed in both industry and academia. Thus, our research aims at developing a new approach that ensures the effectiveness and efficiency of business cooperation based on the service concept. Our approach focuses on three complementary issues that are respectively: implementing service oriented architecture in the enterprise, building collaborative business process based on service compositions and ensuring the service adaptability to context changes. Our research is based on three major principles that are the engineering perspective, integration of flexibility and openness. First, adopting an engineering perspective implies a comprehensive guiding method and strong design principles based on a set of models and meta-models. Second, the flexibility implies considering service adaptability in order to accommodate the changeable situations. Third, the openness principle imposes us to use and to conform to industrial standards.
Coopération interentreprises à la demande : Une approche flexible à base de services adaptables