Institutional trust and security, new boundaries for Virtual Enterprises

Virtual Enterprises are considered an innovative configuration able to improve the benefits in the inter-organizational cooperation. In this context the interoperability of systems and organizations, enabled by standards and technologies, represents a main requirement towards flexibility. However, some obstacles to the development of virtual enterprises have been identified in the limits of cooperation platforms and in the inefficiency of some organizational configurations. Furthermore, there is still a lack of mechanisms aimed at increasing institutional trust and security in these virtual communities. In this paper we outline a set of non-functional requirements for virtual enterprises and we investigate the adoption of federated identity management systems as a possible solution to support “access control” activities for virtual enterprises.