Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
develop a cross-functional team composed of technical staff as well as business architects
who may not know much about technology but who understand the core business. It is
believed that such teams could integrate efforts and streamline cooperation among different
functional departments to create business processes that are efficient, effective, and
responsive.
The New Trade Model in e-Business
With the emergence of the Web-based e-business, enterprises today need a new model
for trade that addresses new requirements in the Internet economy. It is found that the term
“dynamic trade” (Leif, 1998) is often used to define an enterprise ability to satisfy current
demand with customized response. Dynamic trade is expected to go beyond today's Web
efforts, which extend traditional trade with easily available online data, and with customer self-
service for simple inquiries like reviewing account history or checking order status. Instead,
dynamic trade is meant to enable companies to maximize the lifetime value of a business
relationship, through such value-added services as creating product and service bundles
based on actual consumer preferences, and using traditional data to react to market changes.
The New Role of IS/IT in e-Business
It has been commented (McCarthy, 1999) that traditional IS/IT departments have largely
adopted an inward-looking perspective to cater to only the internal users of an enterprise,
but organizations must now work with a new externally focused business model like dynamic
trade. This will inevitably present challenges to the internally focused IS/IT, often preoccu-
pied with such goals as cutting costs and reducing risks. As Internet economy develops, the
emphasis will shift from dumping product information onto the Web pages to delivering
customized services, like buying assistance for consumers or proactive inventory manage-
ment for business partners. According to Cameron (1999), one of the new roles for IS/IT
departments is to become involved in developing new business software that will help
companies exploit the promise of dynamic trade by enabling firms to capture information,
analyze it, and respond to customers in real time. Meanwhile, IS/IT technology personnel will
need more integration specialists, project managers, and business liaisons to ensure that
business processes flow smoothly across internal and external boundaries of the enterprise.
The Enabling Technologies Behind e-Business
One of the main enabling technologies behind e-business development is the reuse of
software components over some standardized distributed-object middleware (Berstein,
1996), through which such components can be moved around at execution time and deployed
in a way that optimizes the technology in order to deliver the most business benefit. These
advances in component technology have resulted in the movement toward separation of
software applications from the increasingly heterogeneous technology platforms on which
the services are deployed (Anderson & Dyson, 2000; Cook, 2000; Braude, 2001). It provides
the potential for an application to be physically distributed so that it services the needs of
the business and not the technology. We call this the service-based view of software
construction, where components provide a method of packaging related services into
prefabricated pieces of software from which solutions can be constructed. This service-
based approach is also applicable in the area of legacy software, where most development
