Collaborative business applications are an active field of research and an emerging practice in industry. This chapter will focus on data protection in b2b applications which offer a wide range of business models and architecture, since often equal partners are involved in the transactions. It will present three distinct applications, their business models, security requirements and the newest solutions for solving these problems. The three applications are collaborative benchmarking, fraud detection and supply chain management. Many of these applications will not be realized if no appropriate measure for protecting the collaborating parties’ data are taken. This chapter focuses on the strongest form of data protection. The business secrets are kept entirely secret from other parties (or at least to the degree possible). This also corresponds to the strongest form of privacy protection in many instances. The private information does not leave the producing system, (i.e., data protection), such that the information producer remains its sole owner. In case of B2B application, the sensitive data are usually business secrets, and not personally identifiable data as in privacy protection.
Collaborative Business Applications: A New Methodological Approach