Extended Communities for Future E-Business

This article is written by Jonathan MITCHENER Some have predicted e-business will be the "Killer App" of the Internet. Whether or not this is the case, there is great potential for organizations doing business online (in both the mass market to consumers and between each other in industry) to take it far beyond that which we know as e-business today. This paper describes the state of the art in e-business that  is yet to be fully realized, but then goes further to review radical ways in which the technology of tomorrow will allow whole supply chains to cooperate electronically to meet customers' needs. In addition, it suggests that if such a future scenario can be achieved, it will reduce operational costs and foster closer and more productive relationships between providers of products and services and their customers. Indeed it may even be a stimulus to re-engineer organizations themselves. As more and more companies trade by e-commerce, they become part of online communities made up of their own departments and those of their suppliers and customers. The secure infrastructure in which this e-commerce takes place is becoming known as a community of interest network (CoIN). These are typically created from Internet protocol (IP), virtual private network (VPN), or extranet technology. Once such a CoIN is established, its members can easily use the secure online environment to publish and share information and communicate with each other. This information can be the business knowledge essential to enable commercial revenue generation.

Directory enabled networks (DEN) allow management control based upon parameters and profiles. These are contained within a specialized (optimized for reading) database known as a directory. The directory contents are typically queried using a streamlined open standard such as the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). Directories offer much higher read performance for such queries over a traditional (e.g., relational) database. They may be scaled, distributed over networks, and replicated for resilience or performance.

Modern workflow technology allows processes to be defined and executed such that human and automated steps can be efficiently combined to deliver a result. Roles of people can be referenced such that delegation or automatic resource load balancing can be achieved. Combining workflow technology with directory-enabled CoINs provides a means to enable end-to-end automated business processes along the length of entire supply chains. The people and the roles and responsibilities they fulfill are examples of profiles held in the directory. The distributed nature of the directory over an IP-based CoIN allows the management of such profiles to be distributed too.

This scenario, although not yet common today, is the assumed state of the art in e-business and the foundation for the remainder of this paper. It is illustrated in figure 1. The next section compares the current situation with this scenario. The remainder will concentrate on how this situation could be taken even further, with a specific look at the need to cope with global diversity in communities. A section describing practical experience of work done to test aspects of the research ideas is also included.

Figure 1

The world today

With the explosion in numbers of organizations having an Internet presence, it is easy to assume that e-business has already arrived. However, when analyzed, e-business currently means little more than repeated e-commerce transactions. While it is true that customers are increasingly able to interact with back-office systems of commercial enterprises to identify required products and services, place orders, and make payments over the Internet, there is little evidence of community, transferred responsibilities, or end-to-end process automation.

 When a transaction takes place in this current scenario, it is often piecemeal in the sense that the online experience for the customer probably takes no account of previous or potential future transactions. Current transactions are typically isolated with respect to other services and aftercare. (For example, an order is submitted online, but any after-sales care has to be done by another means.) From the commercial organization's viewpoint, the infrastructure it uses to communicate with customers is often different from what it uses for online processes. Either way, the notion of total e-business is absent..

Current business processes have, in most cases, simply been transcribed to an online equivalent. Customers are given limited access to the systems of the company they do business with. The company defines, controls, and therefore takes responsibility for the processes that customers can interact with and there is little if any scope for tailoring of the customer's part in the process to match their way of working.

Tomorrow's e-business

Having analyzed traditional approaches to e-business and current examples of online business process automation, the remainder of this paper discusses ideas to extend e-business beyond tomorrow. In particular, as well as building on the aspects of community, responsibility transfer, and whole-supply-chain automation, it incorporates a number of specific advanced principles:

·         Widening of communities to indirect parties

·         Deepening of communities to build trust-based e-business relationships

·         Symmetrical responsibility design

·         Policy-driven e-business

·         Autonomous management within communities

·         Knowledge-directed data sharing

The following sections now look at each of these in more detail. Each section ends with a brief reference to the technology trends that will support these principles.

Extending the communities

Extension by width

Extension by depth

The importance of symmetry

Autonomous management by policy

Knowledge-directed data

Coping with global e-business diversity

Extended communities for e-business may span a global reach. There is therefore an inherent need to ensure that the inevitable rich diversity that occurs globally can be accommodated. It is insufficient to be "connected" by a ubiquitous IP network if the community you belong to neither understands you, nor you it. There are a number of areas of diversity to contend with, including.

1,Business culture: Propositions, transaction requests and responses, presentational issues, and degrees of formality.

2,Economics: Value definitions, payment methods, and currency.

3,Business law: Regulation, governance, trading law, the meaning of contract, etc.

4,Language: Semantics and lexicon differences, both general and industry-sector-specific.

Experience of communities for e-business BT has significant experience on which to base this research work. It has one of the largest intranets in Europe and is a global supplier of IP networks to other organizations. Extranets have been implemented in a number of areas, such as between the marketing group and contracted advertising companies to share and communicate campaign media. BT also supplies IP virtual private networks (VPNs) to global companies and is an established customer of other organizations that lead the way in e-business (e.g., Cisco).

In conclusion, The natural consequence of much of the extended e-business approach of the future described here is the whole re-engineering of organizations from the top down, to reflect new cultures and arrangements for e-business. Although as yet unproven, those who take the risk and move to this way of doing business are likely to radically reduce their costs, harness the trust of suppliers and customers for reliable repeat business, and improve their levels of service.

Indeed the flexibility of organization needed to cope with this type of e-business (as well as the configurability of the supporting systems and processes) will also permit those who embrace it to move quickly to take advantage of new businesses and markets as opportunities arise.

References

1, The Automotive Network Exchange "ANX". http://www.aiag.org/anx

2, Cisco Connection Online CCO. http://www.cisco.com/public/regben.html

3, Omar A El Sawy, Arvind Malhotra, Sanjay Gosain, Kerry M Young, "The relentless pursuit of 'Free.Perfect.Now': IT-enabled value innovation at Marshall Industries," September 1997. http://adv.onewebsystems.com/sim/library/doc/paper1.doc

4, J Dobson, M Martin: "The Ontology of Enterprises and Information Systems," Association for Information Systems 1997 Americas Conference Indianapolis, Indiana, August 1997 http://hsb.baylor.edu/ramsower/ais.ac.97/papers/dobson.htm

5, Microsoft Active Directory http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/library/technologies/activedirectory/

6, RosettaNet. http://www.rosettanet.org/