The Business Process and Business Information Analysis Overview technical report [6] shows again how to get from basic Business Process Modelling to a running system. It emphasises once again the ``Collaboration Business Processes'', not just a company doing its internal administration electronically but seeing the big picture from an economical view point (inter-enterprise). The report sees ``buying and selling products or services'' as the most common business collaboration and ``order-fulfilment-payment'' as the most common pattern for this most common business collaboration .
People thought about Business Processes long before ebXML and as a result there are already models available which have to be converted to be ebXML conform. This provides a good starting point to re-use previous works from different standardisation organisations. The Business Process and Business Information Analysis Overview technical report [6] mentions the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) Enterprise Ontology as an archive of predefined business processes and business process patterns. Unfortunately at the date of the writing of this report the official web site of REA 13 was not operational.
Once again, the idea is to populate the Registry/Repository with meta models, Core Components, Business Information Objects, Business Documents etc. Once the Registry/Repository is populated, new companies, organisations can browse the Registry/Repository and should be able to just ``click'' their CPP together. ebXML talks about Business Process Editors and supporting software to enable this approach. It really depends what a user of ebXML is after. Whether the user wants to add new Core Components, analyse new Business Processes or simply re-use stored data/models. The future will show how ebXML will be accepted and how much the Registry/Repository gets populated. ebXML sees the possibility to have not only public Meta Models (Core Components, Business Information Objects, etc) but also private ones. If the definition of a new killer Business Process wants to be kept private and only selected companies/organisations are allowed to re-use the new killer Business Process, this can be achieved with private, not public available Meta Models. Of course for Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) the more public available information is provided the bigger the chances they are part of the global electronic marketplace, which in the long run can be important to big companies with many SME suppliers and many SME customers.