One of Toolsmiths area of excellence is the domain of  interchange of information, documents and communication through the use of electronic means. This from a business point of view and a technical point of view.

When organizations exchange information internally and externally it is usually not only a technical task to ensure success. In the rawest form system integration is needed to get two or more internal information systems to function as a unit. However when systems are not aligned with business processes problems may occur sooner than later.

Business Collaboration is the case when there exist formal borders between organizations or systems. In this case there is not one party that controls all systems on all sites. Hence collaborations occurs which is different from traditional system integration.

Electronic collaboration can be achieved using human to web site and human to telecom techniques, B2B and traditional EDI.

Current trends that Toolsmiths closely follow are: Web Services, Service Oriented architecture and Business Process Management techniques and tools.

When looking at the the problems of organizations  and IS/IT systems that need to collaborate, to achieve common goals, a few more considerations appear.

Toolsmiths can assist in identifying relevant considerations and provide assessments, plans, architectures and solution design in order strengthen the journey towards operational excellence.

A few more aspects and considerations that ultimately affect the execution of business collaborations. If misalignment exists in any aspect then a business collaboration risk loosing its efficiency towards its goals:

• Business Domain: Business partner often operated within one or more industries that may have developed codes of conduct and practices.
• Supply chain or value net: Within an industry a number of prominent supply chains or values networks has normally been established. Each with its own characteristics.
• Ends and means: Partners enter into relationships with its set of goals and strategies. If misaligned then business reasons may force partnerships to break down.
• Value preference and resource provisioning: Traditional supply and demand  as well as product distribution principles still apply even in the era of Internet.
• Accounting and Regulatory aspects:  Conducting business in a global economy means that enterprises my deal with varying legislation and accounting principles.
• Risk and trust: In a high performance global economy the risks are numerous. Two new risk that internet brings are that some trades are executed at a higher speed thus multiplying any problem per time unit and that trading partners sometimes know less about each other when executing a deal on internet.
• Process: Efficient integration between companies nowadays means that internal business processes must be considered and integrated. Thus business process engineering with all its aspects may be an important consider.
• Information and documents:  In many cases business collaboration, B2B and EDI are considered as equal to sending documents back and forth. However this could work quite well for a couple of document but when documents are many and related to each this minimalistic approach suffers from significant problems.
• IT Systems and infrastructure: One of the most well known areas of implementation is the integration of of information systems on a technical level. Here the recent middleware revolution has created numerous excellent solutions to the task of delivering information to an information system.

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