Towards business quality of service in virtual organisations through service level agreements and ebXML

As e-business becomes a common practice of conducting business activities, the importance of quality increases significantly. This paper explores ways of how e-business quality can be established, monitored, reported and managed. The paper presents a review of the literature referring to the related work on business-level quality of service (QoS) and that on infrastructure QoS. As well as the more theoretical underpinnings introduced in the academic literature, the development activities in progress regarding QoS of Web Services are also discussed. The notion of Request Based Virtual Organisation (RBVO) is then introduced – a value network, which is dynamically formed upon demand to meet identified market needs. From a practical research perspective, the work within the framework of the EU-sponsored LAURA project is presented. The key goal of the LAURA project is to facilitate interregional zones of adaptive electronic commerce using the potential of the ebXML architecture as the chosen underlying technology.