The main task of IT-specialists in the last decades was to develop applications supporting different business functions and processes. For today the enterprises are well equipped with IT-devices and applications, but in most cases they run separately in various business units and/or on different platforms, they work with data stored not only redundant but also in other forms. Consequently there is an urgent need for integrating systems and fulfilling the entrepreneurs', customers', citizens' needs for on-line inter-organizational cooperation. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.