DO E-BUSINESS SYSTEMS HAVE CULTURE AND SHOULD THEY HAVE ONE?

E-business systems, the latest generation of information systems, are used by people from different countries and with different backgrounds. Cultural consideration of software products has been limited to interfaces through internationalization architectures and localization practices. There has been little discussion about the cultural values and practices that are embedded in the core of software e-business systems. These artefacts may lead to modification of cultures and cause their uniformity. To avoid it cultural artefacts need to be considered in both the interface and the core. Two complementary methods are proposed: one is based on the extension of software localization beyond the interface; the other utilizes emerging software design paradigms based on the meta-object orientation