Abstract

The proverbial communication gap between business and IT experts has led to substantial problems in interoperability between different stakeholders of different (business and IT) systems, leading, in turn, to significant monetary losses together with loss of customers ’ trust and patience. The paper demonstrates not only the problems but also the solution — a clear separation between the business and IT domains based on an explicit usage of a system of concepts common to all domains and understood by all stakeholders. These elegant concepts come from exact philosophy, mathematics, programming and systems thinking and have been described in an international standard, the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing The paper shows how a system of exactified concepts and approaches has been used to understand and specify the semantics of non-trivial industrial business and IT systems, thus establishing a basis for successful communication between business and IT experts, that is, for semantic (and sometimes syntactic) interoperability.

Citations