CHALLENGES IN ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
What is EC?
For more than two decades, organizations have conducted business electronically by employing a variety of electronic commerce solutions. In the traditional scenario, an organization enters the electronic market by establishing trading partner agreements with retailers or wholesalers of their choosing.
These agreements may include any items that cannot be reconciled electronically, such as terms of transfer, payment mechanisms, or implementation conventions. After establishing the proper business relationships, an organization must choose the components of their electronic commerce system. Although these systems differ substantially in terms of features and complexity, the core components typically include:
1. Workflow Application: A forms interface that aids the user in creating outgoing requests or viewing incoming requests. Information that appears in these forms may also be stored in a local database.
2. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Translator: A mapping between the local format and a globally understood format.
3. Communications: A mechanism for transmitting the data; typically asynchronous or bisynchronous.
4. Value-Added Network (VAN): a store and forward mechanism for exchanging business messages
Using an electronic commerce system , a retailer may maintain an electronic merchandise inventory and update the inventory database when items are received from suppliers or sold to customers. When the inventory of a particular item is low, the retailer may create a purchase order to replenish his inventory. As the purchase order passes through the system, it will be translated into its EDI equivalent, transmitted to a VAN, and forwarded to the supplier’s mailbox. The supplier will check his mailbox, obtain the EDI purchase order, translate it into his own local form, process the request, and ship the item.
These technologies have primarily been used to support business transactions between organizations that have established relationships (i.e. retailer and the wholesaler). More recently, due largely to the popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, vendors are bringing the product directly to the consumer via electronic shopping malls. These electronic malls provide the consumer with powerful browsing and searching capabilities, somewhat duplicating the traditional shopping experience. In this emerging business-to- consumer model, where consumers and businesses are meeting electronically, business relationships will have to be automatically negotiated.
The Challenge
As the information technology industry moves towards the creation of an open, competitive Electronic Marketplace, it must provide an infrastructure that supports the seamless location, transfer, and integration of business information in a secure and reliable manner. This Marketplace will be used by all application domains to procure commodities and order supplies. As such, electronic commerce applications will require easy-to-use, robust, security services, a full suite of middleware services, and data and protocol conversion services. Using this Electronic Marketplace, a purchasing agent will competitively procure supplies, a manufacturer will obtain product or parts information, and a consumer will procure goods and services.
Building Blocks
In the heterogeneous, distributed environment that makes up this Electronic Marketplace, information and services will be accessible via methods that are as wide and as varied as the vendors and consumers that populate and use them. No longer will interoperability be achieved by using a single set of standards. Competing technologies will always be available, and quite often there will be no clear winner. Instead, emerging middleware technologies will complement the suite of standards and standards to provide seamless location, transfer, and integration of business information.
One can imagine, that over time, the Electronic Marketplace will be populated with a myriad of products and services. To aid the consumer in finding useful and necessary information from amongst the vast sea of resources that will ultimately be available, advances in resource discovery technologies will be critical. Key components that will be necessary to advance resource discovery techniques are distributed naming and directory services. Distributed naming services provide an environment that allows functions to move transparently among computing platforms. Coupling this feature with directory services provides a method for organizations to dynamically register business capabilities as they move on and off the information highway.
As the amount of information that can be exchanged grows, traditional communications protocols will give way to a set of faster and more reliable protocols. Middleware communications will be used to hide the complexity of the underlying communications protocols. Applications will require programmable interfaces to message queuing, database access, remote procedure calls, and object request brokers. It is imperative that the communications infrastructure be able to support these and future services in a flexible and efficient manner.
The seamless location and transfer of information will allow consumers and providers to exchange business information, but will not provide for the integration of that information into their business processes. Current data translation practices allow for a syntactic translation of information, which works well when semantic differences can be settled out of band. In the Electronic Marketplace, where entire business paradigms must be established electronically, it will be necessary to carry both the semantics and syntax of data elements through the data translation process.
Security services will be imperative in the daily operation of the Electronic Marketplace. Applications will require a full suite of end-to-end security services, including authentication, integrity, confidentiality, non-repudiation, and access control. The first three services can be achieved through public-key cryptosystems that employ digital signature, encryption, and key exchange technologies. Non-repudiation can be added through the use of a certification authority. Upon user authentication, traditional access control or role-based access control methods can be employed to define access rights.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in creating this Electronic Marketplace will be to overcome current interoperability problems caused by competing security algorithms, message formats, and certificate management systems. Security is a prime example of a situation where competing solutions exist and there is no clear winner in sight.
Recent work in the area of cryptographic API’s promises to provide a well-defined, high-level interface to security services, regardless of the complexity of the underlying algorithms.
Differences in message formats and certificate management systems must similarly be overcome, either through standards, or through the use of mediators and facilitators.
Solutions
To directly address the issues of building an information infrastructure that will support an Electronic Marketplace, the
National Institute of Standards and Technology has established two cooperative, complementary programs. The CAIT, under the guidance of industry participants, identifies, develops, and demonstrates critical new technologies and applications. The
ECIF provides a laboratory environment that supports technology transfer through rapid prototypes, pilots, the integration of key infrastructure components and services, and the demonstration of existing and emerging Electronic Commerce technologies. Through on-going projects in the areas of database access, facilitators and mediators, resource discovery, secure messaging, and integration technologies, the
CAIT and ECIF focus on the following:
1. Where enabling services and technology are not yet commercially available, NIST fosters joint research projects aimed at bringing together the research community and the vendor community. This joint fellowship provides vendors with the tools they need to quickly implement emerging technologies while researchers remain focused in their development of new technologies.
2. Where components are commercially available, NIST creates test beds and pilots aimed at achieving interoperable solutions. These solutions are achieved by demonstrating interoperability among middleware technologies, standards and defect standards.
3. Promotes technical awareness via presentations, publications, demonstrations, and consulting.
E-Commerce Communities
What it is that will drive e-commerce in the future? —
in a word, it’s community. We certainly have the technology to build great business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce applications into our business models. And, yes, attributes such as viable application design, integration with business processes, and overall performance matter.
But I predict that those who invest in community will see a large increase in repeat business, improved support functions, and the opportunity to go after new forms of e-commerce revenue.
So what is community and how do you form one? A successful community strategy must embrace the idea of moving the one-on-one communication that occurs offline into the virtual world of e-commerce. Such a strategy currently requires multiple technical approaches. However, I believe community solutions will soon become more integrated and far-reaching.
Imagine if I transferred my cat food interaction into the virtual world. If I were a consumer doing my marketing online or a business inquiring about brand availability from a supplier, that same type of interaction could easily be supported within an e-commerce setting using one of several options.
The tools that form online communities include discussion or forum software, chat functions, instant messaging, two-way mailing lists, online collaboration tools, audio, video, and more.
You may choose to invest slowly at first and increase your community commitment over time.
For example, the online version of my cat food brand inquiry might be fulfilled simply via a pop-up notification window on my return visit, assuming your e-commerce application was enabled to take my feedback. Or, in a more sophisticated version, you might make a customer service representative available via video and audio. The same type of solutions can be enabled for business-to-business transactions.
Online business is much more exacting, and those participating usually have a darn good idea of what they want. Better to let me contact you and supply my long-distance requirements; then you provide me a one-on-one analysis of how I could save money by switching companies. The feedback should be supplied without a long or scripted marketing pitch, too.
Community is also a wise strategic investment in other ways.
Suppose you set up a moderated discussion group or a two-way mailing list to get people talking about your products.
Consumers will often have good ideas about product improvements or good or bad experiences with the product. By implementing these types of open communication, a company may gather ideas about new product offerings, improvement of existing products, or methods of bolstering support, all of which will likely yield repeat business.
Online conversation with business partners will also give net positive results. A private discussion area or secured online meetings can go a long way toward building stronger relationships between companies. This will also serve to potentially drive new business opportunities for both parties.
Building community has to be at the heart of any successful e-commerce strategy. Certainly I do not think we can totally mimic offline human interaction in an online setting. However, e-commerce settings today are very inhuman in nature; we need to factor in the human part of the equation if e-commerce is to be successful.
Have you formed your community strategy?
What is EC?
For more than two decades, organizations have conducted business electronically by employing a variety of electronic commerce solutions. In the traditional scenario, an organization enters the electronic market by establishing trading partner agreements with retailers or wholesalers of their choosing.
These agreements may include any items that cannot be reconciled electronically, such as terms of transfer, payment mechanisms, or implementation conventions. After establishing the proper business relationships, an organization must choose the components of their electronic commerce system. Although these systems differ substantially in terms of features and complexity, the core components typically include:
1. Workflow Application: A forms interface that aids the user in creating outgoing requests or viewing incoming requests. Information that appears in these forms may also be stored in a local database.
2. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Translator: A mapping between the local format and a globally understood format.
3. Communications: A mechanism for transmitting the data; typically asynchronous or bisynchronous.
4. Value-Added Network (VAN): a store and forward mechanism for exchanging business messages
Using an electronic commerce system , a retailer may maintain an electronic merchandise inventory and update the inventory database when items are received from suppliers or sold to customers. When the inventory of a particular item is low, the retailer may create a purchase order to replenish his inventory. As the purchase order passes through the system, it will be translated into its EDI equivalent, transmitted to a VAN, and forwarded to the supplier’s mailbox. The supplier will check his mailbox, obtain the EDI purchase order, translate it into his own local form, process the request, and ship the item.
These technologies have primarily been used to support business transactions between organizations that have established relationships (i.e. retailer and the wholesaler). More recently, due largely to the popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, vendors are bringing the product directly to the consumer via electronic shopping malls. These electronic malls provide the consumer with powerful browsing and searching capabilities, somewhat duplicating the traditional shopping experience. In this emerging business-to- consumer model, where consumers and businesses are meeting electronically, business relationships will have to be automatically negotiated.
The Challenge
As the information technology industry moves towards the creation of an open, competitive Electronic Marketplace, it must provide an infrastructure that supports the seamless location, transfer, and integration of business information in a secure and reliable manner. This Marketplace will be used by all application domains to procure commodities and order supplies. As such, electronic commerce applications will require easy-to-use, robust, security services, a full suite of middleware services, and data and protocol conversion services. Using this Electronic Marketplace, a purchasing agent will competitively procure supplies, a manufacturer will obtain product or parts information, and a consumer will procure goods and services.
Building Blocks
In the heterogeneous, distributed environment that makes up this Electronic Marketplace, information and services will be accessible via methods that are as wide and as varied as the vendors and consumers that populate and use them. No longer will interoperability be achieved by using a single set of standards. Competing technologies will always be available, and quite often there will be no clear winner. Instead, emerging middleware technologies will complement the suite of standards and standards to provide seamless location, transfer, and integration of business information.
One can imagine, that over time, the Electronic Marketplace will be populated with a myriad of products and services. To aid the consumer in finding useful and necessary information from amongst the vast sea of resources that will ultimately be available, advances in resource discovery technologies will be critical. Key components that will be necessary to advance resource discovery techniques are distributed naming and directory services. Distributed naming services provide an environment that allows functions to move transparently among computing platforms. Coupling this feature with directory services provides a method for organizations to dynamically register business capabilities as they move on and off the information highway.
As the amount of information that can be exchanged grows, traditional communications protocols will give way to a set of faster and more reliable protocols. Middleware communications will be used to hide the complexity of the underlying communications protocols. Applications will require programmable interfaces to message queuing, database access, remote procedure calls, and object request brokers. It is imperative that the communications infrastructure be able to support these and future services in a flexible and efficient manner.
The seamless location and transfer of information will allow consumers and providers to exchange business information, but will not provide for the integration of that information into their business processes. Current data translation practices allow for a syntactic translation of information, which works well when semantic differences can be settled out of band. In the Electronic Marketplace, where entire business paradigms must be established electronically, it will be necessary to carry both the semantics and syntax of data elements through the data translation process.
Security services will be imperative in the daily operation of the Electronic Marketplace. Applications will require a full suite of end-to-end security services, including authentication, integrity, confidentiality, non-repudiation, and access control. The first three services can be achieved through public-key cryptosystems that employ digital signature, encryption, and key exchange technologies. Non-repudiation can be added through the use of a certification authority. Upon user authentication, traditional access control or role-based access control methods can be employed to define access rights.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in creating this Electronic Marketplace will be to overcome current interoperability problems caused by competing security algorithms, message formats, and certificate management systems. Security is a prime example of a situation where competing solutions exist and there is no clear winner in sight.
Recent work in the area of cryptographic API’s promises to provide a well-defined, high-level interface to security services, regardless of the complexity of the underlying algorithms.
Differences in message formats and certificate management systems must similarly be overcome, either through standards, or through the use of mediators and facilitators.
Solutions
To directly address the issues of building an information infrastructure that will support an Electronic Marketplace, the
National Institute of Standards and Technology has established two cooperative, complementary programs. The CAIT, under the guidance of industry participants, identifies, develops, and demonstrates critical new technologies and applications. The
ECIF provides a laboratory environment that supports technology transfer through rapid prototypes, pilots, the integration of key infrastructure components and services, and the demonstration of existing and emerging Electronic Commerce technologies. Through on-going projects in the areas of database access, facilitators and mediators, resource discovery, secure messaging, and integration technologies, the
CAIT and ECIF focus on the following:
1. Where enabling services and technology are not yet commercially available, NIST fosters joint research projects aimed at bringing together the research community and the vendor community. This joint fellowship provides vendors with the tools they need to quickly implement emerging technologies while researchers remain focused in their development of new technologies.
2. Where components are commercially available, NIST creates test beds and pilots aimed at achieving interoperable solutions. These solutions are achieved by demonstrating interoperability among middleware technologies, standards and defect standards.
3. Promotes technical awareness via presentations, publications, demonstrations, and consulting.
E-Commerce Communities
What it is that will drive e-commerce in the future? —
in a word, it’s community. We certainly have the technology to build great business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce applications into our business models. And, yes, attributes such as viable application design, integration with business processes, and overall performance matter.
But I predict that those who invest in community will see a large increase in repeat business, improved support functions, and the opportunity to go after new forms of e-commerce revenue.
So what is community and how do you form one? A successful community strategy must embrace the idea of moving the one-on-one communication that occurs offline into the virtual world of e-commerce. Such a strategy currently requires multiple technical approaches. However, I believe community solutions will soon become more integrated and far-reaching.
Imagine if I transferred my cat food interaction into the virtual world. If I were a consumer doing my marketing online or a business inquiring about brand availability from a supplier, that same type of interaction could easily be supported within an e-commerce setting using one of several options.
The tools that form online communities include discussion or forum software, chat functions, instant messaging, two-way mailing lists, online collaboration tools, audio, video, and more.
You may choose to invest slowly at first and increase your community commitment over time.
For example, the online version of my cat food brand inquiry might be fulfilled simply via a pop-up notification window on my return visit, assuming your e-commerce application was enabled to take my feedback. Or, in a more sophisticated version, you might make a customer service representative available via video and audio. The same type of solutions can be enabled for business-to-business transactions.
Online business is much more exacting, and those participating usually have a darn good idea of what they want. Better to let me contact you and supply my long-distance requirements; then you provide me a one-on-one analysis of how I could save money by switching companies. The feedback should be supplied without a long or scripted marketing pitch, too.
Community is also a wise strategic investment in other ways.
Suppose you set up a moderated discussion group or a two-way mailing list to get people talking about your products.
Consumers will often have good ideas about product improvements or good or bad experiences with the product. By implementing these types of open communication, a company may gather ideas about new product offerings, improvement of existing products, or methods of bolstering support, all of which will likely yield repeat business.
Online conversation with business partners will also give net positive results. A private discussion area or secured online meetings can go a long way toward building stronger relationships between companies. This will also serve to potentially drive new business opportunities for both parties.
Building community has to be at the heart of any successful e-commerce strategy. Certainly I do not think we can totally mimic offline human interaction in an online setting. However, e-commerce settings today are very inhuman in nature; we need to factor in the human part of the equation if e-commerce is to be successful.
Have you formed your community strategy?
Ecommerce helps you to create the online store providing features like web-based administration, easy-to-use product creation screens.
ReplyDeleteEcommerce Shopping Cart