The Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model

Over the last decade, the context of interoperability has been changing rapidly. It has been expanding from the largely technically focused area of Information Systems toward Business Processes and Business Semantics. However, there exists a need for established methods to define Business Interoperability and provide for measuring its performance as a first step toward improving interoperability conditions between collaborating entities. This paper proposes a model that captures the factors that are responsible for Business Interoperability in the context of collaborative business processes. The Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM) uses an interdisciplinary approach to embrace the key elements responsible for collaboration performance. Through the quantification of the importance of each element to the particular collaboration scenario, and by combining the BIQMM with the Analytical Network Process (ANP) approach, this model enables a quantitative analysis of Business Interoperability, so that an overall interoperability score can be calculated for enhanced performance measurements. Two application scenarios are presented, validating the proposed model.

► We developed Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM) – a multidisciplinary 8 layer hierarchical structure to comprehensively define Business Interoperability.
► We establish questions and associated issues to be able to evaluate each layer of interoperability.
► We apply Analytical Network Processes (ANP) to BIQMM to evaluate Business Interoperability.
► We describe two business application scenarios and two case studies demonstrating the use of this technique.