e-Business challenges and directions: important themes from the first ICE-B workshop

A three-day asynchronous, interactive workshop was held at ICE-B’10 in Piraeus, Greece in July of 2010. This event captured conference themes for e-Business challenges and directions across four subject areas: a) e-Business applications and models, b) enterprise engineering, c) mobility, d) business collaboration and e-Services, and e) technology platforms. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods were used to gather, organize and evaluate themes and their ratings. This paper summarizes the most important themes rated by participants: a) Since technology is becoming more economic and social in nature, more agile and context-based application develop methods are needed. b) Enterprise engineering approaches are needed to support the design of systems that can evolve with changing stakeholder needs. c) The digital native groundswell requires changes to business models, operations, and systems to support Prosumers. d) Intelligence and interoperability are needed to address Prosumer activity and their highly customized product purchases. e) Technology platforms must rapidly and correctly adapt, provide widespread offerings and scale appropriately, in the context of changing situational contexts

Assessing business transaction standards and their adoption: A cross case analysis between the SETU and Vektis standards

Nowadays businesses increasingly want to be\ud interoperable so that they can collaborate with other\ud organizations. Interoperability can be achieved through the use of\ud business transaction standards, by which the organizations that\ud use the standards collectively form a value added network.\ud However the effectivity of these standards is largely dependant on\ud the number of organizations that have adopted it, and thus it is\ud very important that the standard conforms to the conditions that\ud organizations have towards adopting these standards. Building on\ud recent literature describing technical standards [1], we have\ud constructed a model through which standard aspects can be\ud compared with the adoption conditions that organizations have.\ud Subsequently cross case analysis methods were used to identify\ud important aspects that influence the adoption of business\ud transaction standards, as well as the identification of methods by\ud which the aspects can be adapted by an Standard Development\ud Organization (SDO) so that higher standard adoption is achieved.\ud This evaluation can give managers and SDO’s a higher\ud understanding on standards itself and the domain it is supposed\ud to function in. The cases demonstrated that early involvement of\ud organizations with high market powers (preferably through a\ud federation that represents these organizations) is important for\ud adoption whereby the development and maintenance of the\ud standard should preferably be funded by those organizations that\ud have most to gain from broad standard adoption. Furthermore\ud open characteristics, modularity and efficient business processes\ud are perceived imperative for the adoption of business transaction\ud standards