Integrating E-services with a Telecommunication E-commerce using Service-Oriented Architecture

Abstract

In the past, electronic commerce only focused on customer-to-business web interaction and on business-tobusiness web interaction. With the emergence of business process management and of service-oriented architecture, the focus has shifted to the development of e-services that integrate business processes and that diversify functionalities available to customers. The potential of electronic commerce and its information technology also has attracted some telecommunication corporations—for example, Chunghwa Telecom, Singtel Telecom, and AT&T. They have built their electronic commerce environment on the Internet, too. Most of these worldwide telecom corporations have many kinds of operations support systems in their backend environment. In the past, enterprises had to integrate their telecom services manually, so that they could work together. However, this integration required considerable time and cost, and it worked only for the specific services that were manually linked. Adding additional services required even more effort. And then, enterprise application integration (EAI) solved these kinds of problems by working via point-to-point interfaces. In this paper, we present a research framework to describe the method. Then, we use two illustrations to explain the generality of our method, and we focus on how international telecom corporations have become concerned with the agility, the leanness, and the integration underlying electronic services (e-services) integration with enterprise application interface technology.