Abstract
In the current socio-economic environment, to face challenges such as the emergence of new technologies, globalisation and increasing demands from their clients it is inevitable that enterprises will collaborate with others and progressively shift their boundaries. In this context, interoperability has become a prerequisite in the jigsaw of such collaboration. By definition, it is entities' ability to work together as an organisation. This ability spans a wide range of aspects, embracing both technical and business issues. Over the past decade, both the concept and the context of interoperability have been extended from a largely IT-focused domain to a business-focused domain and the evaluation of interoperability has become a rising concern. An increasing number of studies have concentrated on not just digital but business aspects of human behaviour in the social environment. In general, the wider application domain is the assessment of the interoperability of information systems and processes in any organisation (especially medium and large) that needs multiple processes to interact effectively.
To deal with such concerns and pave the way to achievement of more effective collaborative goals in business, the concept of interoperability has been adopted to measure the efficiency and productivity of information systems' integration. More than twenty approaches have so far been adopted to evaluate this interoperability, however most are unable to assess it at the higher levels, such as at the pragmatic, process and social levels. Hence, we have conducted a three-phase study. Phase 1 reviewed existing interoperability evaluation approaches. To prove the concept, phase 2 proposed the concept of semiotic interoperability and its application to healthcare information systems. This article reports on the third phase of the study, a proposed framework with a group of metrics to measure interoperability from a new perspective - a semiotics perspective. The framework is named the Semiotic Interoperability Evaluation Framework (the SIEF) and has the ability to analyse, measure and assess the interoperability among business processes. The metrics derive from a feasibility study to investigate several interoperability barriers at a hospital. Next, the SIEF was applied in a case study and a detailed interoperability evaluation was conducted.