Business System Interoperation (BSI)
- a Generic Solution

1. Principles of BSI.

Some business processes, such as financial accounting, stock counting etc, can be contained within one Business System. These are termed Internal Processes. Other processes, such as purchasing, payments, etc, are transactions between two Business Systems and are termed External Processes.

Here are the basic steps involved in External processes:

An application program of one Business System (ie a business process implemented on a computer) generates a file containing the transaction attributes for a specific business activity (i.e. business process). This Transaction File is enclosed, conceptually without modification, in a Control Envelope, which carries the address of the target business system together with the identification of both the contents of the envelope and the sending (source) business system. The Control envelope with its imbedded content forms an Interchange File. The Interchange file is transported electronically to the processing (target) Business System by any convenient mechanism.

When the Interchange file is received by the target Business System, the Transaction attributes are removed from the Control Envelope and passed to the Application program for processing.

However, in an open environment, each of these interoperating application programs must be assumed to have been written by independent programmers with no prior arrangements between them. Therefore, the way in which the transaction attributes are presented must be assumed to be laid out differently for each of the application programs involved in the interoperation, even though there will be a degree of commonality.

If the programmers of both of these applications were to supply a definition of the file they designed to carry transaction attributes to a third programmer, then that programmer would be able to write a program which extracts the attributes from one transaction file and uses them to build another transaction file to the specifications of the processing program. Similarly, if the Specifications of each file design were supplied to a general purpose program, that program would be able to extract the information required by the processing application program (at the receiving end) from the incoming Transaction File.

This is the basis of BSI. Its strengths are:

• Its ability to provide a flexible coupling with which interoperation can be established between different Business Systems. This decouples each party to the interoperation and means changes can be introduced to either end without the other side being aware of the change. Modifications can thus be made by a unilateral decision and action. The unannounced change is cut in fully automatically. This all but eliminates the cost and complexity of maintenence.
• Its ability to operate in an open environment without the need for agreements, arrangements or even human contact prior to doing business electronically.
• The operation of BSI is quite invisible to the end user. This eliminates all end user training costs and encumberances and limits help desk costs to communication network problems only.
• BSI can be shrink-wrapped with an application software package and installed invisibly with it. This point is particularly important for involving small and medium organisations, who rely on packaged business solutions software, in electronic commerce.

One specific application of BSI is to enable SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) as well as large enterprises to become involved in automatic Electronic Commerce. This is a result of its simplicity in design, implementation and operation combined with its low cost of installation and day to day usage. These factors also make it attractive and suitable for the development and marketing of shrink-wrapped business application software for Electronic Commerce - a critical factor for SMEs to become involved.

2. Further Information

The principles and benefits of BSI.are summarised. This can also be downloaded as a winword 6.0 document.

An on line Powerpoint (4.0) presentation is available, Automated Electronic Interoperation and may be downloaded. This presentation is fully scripted in the Notes section, so by downloading and printing out the Notes, anyone can make this presentation to an audience.

A demonstration of the principles of BSI is available.