Standardisation in enterprise inter- and intra-organisational integration

The world-wide collaboration and co-operation of enterprises of all sizes has increased the need for standards, especially for the way of doing business in such environments. Such standards are concerned with the communication aspects of information and communication technology (ICT), like protocols, safety and security as well as the syntax and semantics of the communication content. Sender and receiver have to trust the communication itself and they both have to have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information. Unfortunately, the standards are developed independently by different standards organisation using incompatible and inconsistent terminology and thereby hampering significantly the deployment of existing standards and the development of still missing ones. The paper presents existing standards in the area of inter- and intra-organisational integration and identifies problems in the area of terminology.