An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector

The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered. From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications

Perspectives on information and supply chains within investment banking

Supply chain concepts are usually confined to industries where there are core sourcing, manufacture and delivery processes. These industries are usually to be found within the industrial products, aerospace, automotive, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. Supply Chain Management (SCM) concepts, have not necessarily been associated with financial services, apart from concepts of information management and process flow, in the loosest sense. This paper attempts to describe how supply chain concepts are very much an inherent part of the financial services process landscape, with particular reference to the field of investment banking. In doing so, the paper explores IT/IS issues impacting within the investment banking industry, focussing on the requirements for efficient distribution of sales and research data. Following this, the authors extend concepts of supply chain and information management, to realise the concept of an Investment Banking Information Supply Chain (IBISC)

User adoption of a CRM-based information system within a financial services organisation: An empirical analysis

Financial Services firms require processes and systems which can support and maintain customer-related information for the purposes of core business-focussed activity. Specifically within the investment banking sector, the importance and criticality of such customer information underpins the firm’s ability to transact sales, trading and other advisory-based services in an efficient and relevant manner. The design and development of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to address the given external vs. internal customer information touchpoints, therefore provides a vital link between financial services professionals, client data and business processes. In doing so, the input of CRM user requirements is a key step in deriving benefit from such a technology solution. This paper henceforth identifies and details user requirements and experiences of such an information system within a case study company and highlights pertinent issues for the adoption of such systems within the given secto

webXice: an Infrastructure for Information Commerce on the WWW

Systems for information commerce on the WWW have to support flexible business models if they should be able to cover a wide range of requirements imposed by the different types of information businesses. This leads to non-trivial functional and security requirements both on the provider and consumer side, for which we introduce an architecture and a system implementation, webXice. We focus on the question, how participants with minimal technological requisites, i.e. solely standard Web browsers available, can be technologically enabled to articipate in the information commerce at a system level, while not sacrificing the functionality and security required by an autonomous participant in an information commerce scenario. In particular, we propose an implementation strategy to efficiently support persistent message logging for light-weight clients, that enables clients to collect and manage non-reputiable messages as proofs. We believe that the capability to support minimal system platforms is a necessary precondition for the wide-spread use of any information commerce infrastructure

An Email Attachment is Worth a Thousand Words, or Is It?

There is an extensive body of research on Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on the email archive. The network used in the analysis is generally extracted either by capturing the email communication in From, To, Cc and Bcc email header fields or by the entities contained in the email message. In the latter case, the entities could be, for instance, the bag of words, url's, names, phones, etc. It could also include the textual content of attachments, for instance Microsoft Word documents, excel spreadsheets, or Adobe pdfs. The nodes in this network represent users and entities. The edges represent communication between users and relations to the entities. We suggest taking a different approach to the network extraction and use attachments shared between users as the edges. The motivation for this is two-fold. First, attachments represent the "intimacy" manifestation of the relation's strength. Second, the statistical analysis of private email archives that we collected and Enron email corpus shows that the attachments contribute in average around 80-90% to the archive's disk-space usage, which means that most of the data is presently ignored in the SNA of email archives. Consequently, we hypothesize that this approach might provide more insight into the social structure of the email archive. We extract the communication and shared attachments networks from Enron email corpus. We further analyze degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centrality measures in both networks and review the differences and what can be learned from them. We use nearest neighbor algorithm to generate similarity groups for five Enron employees. The groups are consistent with Enron's organizational chart, which validates our approach.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables, IML'17, Liverpool, U

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

Mapping service components to EJB business objects

The emerging trends for e-business engineering revolve around specialisation and cooperation. Successful companies focus on their core competencies and rely on a network of business partners for the support services required to compose a comprehensive offer for their customers. Modularity is crucial for a flexible e-business infrastructure, but related requirements seldom reflect on the design and operational models of business information systems. Software components are widely used for the implementation of e-business applications, with proven benefits in terms of system development and maintenance. We propose a service-oriented componentisation of e-business systems as a way to close the gap with the business models they support. Blurring the distinction between external services and internal capabilities, we propose a homogeneous model for the definition of e-business applications components and present a process-based technique for component modelling. We finally present an Enterprise Java Beans extension that implements the model

Marketing management of a successful e-business

Marketing management occupies an increasingly important position in the business world, as well as in the sphere of electronic commerce. Some participants, however, underestimate the importance of this marketing support, which may be one of the major causes of the failure and inability of some companies operating on the Internet to grow. The aim of this paper is to develop an effective marketing management process model, which can significantly contribute to the increased competitiveness of companies operating on the Internet. The validity of this model is then applied on a Czech e-shop, which has long been one of the leaders of the Czech Internet market. To achieve the objective of this paper the current situation will be analysed, and synthesis of the findings from research literature as well as modelling using the methods of abstraction and specification will be performed. This article is focused on Czech Internet market. Results of the survey (case study) will be used for further research in the field of e-business