27.06.2013 Views

6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

Information Management Security for Inter-Organisational<br />

Business Processes, Services and Collaboration<br />

Maria Semmelrock-Picej 1 , Alfred Possegger 2 and Andreas Stopper 2<br />

1<br />

eBusiness Institute, Klagenfurt University, Austria<br />

2<br />

Infineon IT-Services GmbH Austria, Austria<br />

Maria.Semmelrock-Picej@aau.at<br />

Alfred.Possegger@infineon.com<br />

Andreas.Stopper@infineon.com<br />

Abstract: Web-based collaborations and cross-organizational processes typically require dynamic and contextbased<br />

interactions between involved parties and services. Due to temporary nature of collaboration and an<br />

evolving of competencies of involved companies over time security issues like trust, privacy and identity<br />

management are of a high interest for a long lasting success of virtual collaborations This paper adresses this<br />

issue by presenting some results of an international research project. The vision of this project is to implement a<br />

virtual cooperation system for SMEs to be used for realizing competitive advantages through virtual cooperations.<br />

The paper describes some results of this system. Especially we will discuss issues concerned with identity<br />

management. Identity Federation is one of the key concepts of SPIKE to support “virtual organizations”, their fast<br />

setup, comfortable maintenance and orderly closing. This paper describes the mechanisms from which<br />

collaboration partners, registered at the SPIKE platform, will be authenticated by using a standardized identity<br />

federation protocol – Shibboleth. It is shown how the identity data of a company, using its own IDMS, can be<br />

integrated into the SPIKE platform and what a company has to setup from a technical point of view so that its<br />

employees can be authenticated via Shibboleth. Further an approach is presented suitable for mostly SMEs<br />

which do not have an own IDMS.<br />

Keywords: eCollaboration, security, identity management, phases of cooperation<br />

1. Introduction<br />

Nowadays competition is no longer between single enterprises but among supply chains with numerous<br />

actors. Effective supply chain management has therefore become a potentially valuable way of<br />

securing a competitive advantage and improving organizational performance. Firms are seeking<br />

synergistic combinations of resources and changing their roles and value positions through digital<br />

collaborations (Klein, Rai and Straub 2007). However the understanding of the how and which areas<br />

are most important for the success is still incomplete.<br />

It has been noted in literature that information and communication technologies have a significant<br />

impact on the economic situation and knowledge based activites in peripheral regions. Especially for<br />

SMEs in the cross-border region Carinthia and Slovenia (Ziener 2010) identified a low rate of<br />

internationalization, a small amount of crossborder supply chain networks and activities limited to<br />

regional borders.<br />

ICT support collaboration among people with different competencies and capabilities in virtual<br />

collaborations (Mohrmann et al. 2003), facilitate knowledge access and sharing (Davenport and<br />

Prusak 1998) and enable the codification and dissemination of explicit knowledge (Zack 1999). Virtual<br />

collaboration also increases the knowledge about who knows what, enabling virtual joint work and<br />

supporting easier and fast setup of short-term project based and loosely coupled chains among<br />

participants. In doing so, studies have analyzed that a participation of small and medium sized<br />

enterprises in eCollaboration environments could improve their situation in peripheral regions.<br />

However, despite the general agreement on the positive impacts of virtual collaborations, detailed<br />

micro level evidence on the preconditions and success is limited. Yet it has been analysed, that the<br />

way SMEs interact in collaborative environments depends to a big extent on the security<br />

functionalities and management which impact on almost all knowledge-related activities as a basic<br />

precondition. In other words, existing work typically narrows to very specific processes or activities.<br />

This contribution emphasizes the potential capability of ICTs and their fundamental role to create a<br />

virtual dimension through which companies can share and create new knowledge at both tacit and<br />

explicit level.<br />

Companies have a serious privacy concern about how their information is used, disclosed and<br />

protected and the degree of control they have over the dissemination of the information. Especially<br />

238

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!