A Future for Digital Commerce:Research and Education

Opportunities

Walt Scacchi

ATRIUM Laboratory

University of Southern California

Overview

• Background: ECommerce on the Internet

• Information Logistics

• Computational Business Processes

• Research and Education Opportunities

• Conclusions

Emergence of EC on the Internet• Benefits: Customer, Supplier, Operational

• Providing ISPs and WWW presence

• Electronic publishing and advertising

• Electronic retailing

• Electronic customer channels

• Electronic data interchange (EDI)

• Networked data warehousing and mining

• Loosely-coupled business process networks

Emergence of EC on the Internet• See

http://www.usc.edu/dept/ATRIUM/Papers/ Electronic_Commerce.html for details, definitions, and examples.

Information Logistics

• What is it?

• What is it good for?

• Who should care?

Information LogisticsWhat is it?

• Addresses the coordinated movement of very large quantities of (semi-)structured information/data sets over shared information infrastructures

• Efforts to move aggregate quantities of information in the range of 1012 to 1022 bytes (1GB to 10EB) can already be anticipated

Information LogisticsWhat is it--Activities

• Planning and mapping• Acquisition• Cataloging and

warehousing• Distribution

• Transportation• Installation and

building• Adaptive replanning• (Remote) Maintenance• Termination

Information Logistics: What is it good for?

• ECommerce-based data warehousing

• International caching of digital libraries

• Large-scale roll out of new software products (e.g., MS WindowsY2K)

• Global contracting services for multi-national enterprises

• Virtual database “catching” and “casting”

• Other high value ($$$) information services

Information Logistics: Who should care?

• See previous slide, then deduce or guess which companies and government agencies would be interested.

Computational Business Processes

• Growing interest among start-ups for Internet-based sources for the provision of intermediate products or services.

• Potential trading partners can negotiate and electronically contract for remote sourcing agreements via network ties.

• Can lead to the configuration of virtual enterprises via CBP components

Computational Business Processes--Life Cycle Activities

Meta-modeling Visualization Enactment

Modeling Prototyping Measurement

Analysis Administration History andReplay

Simulation Integration Articulation

Redesign EnvironmentGeneration

AssetManagement

Computational Business Processes

• See http://www.usc.edu/dept/ATRIUM/Process_Life_Cycle.html for definitions, experience reports, and examples.

• See http://www.usc.edu/dept/ATRIUM/Papers/ Process_Life_Cycle.html for the paper.

Computational Business Processes

Computational Business Processes

Computational Business Processes

Computational Business Processes

Research and Education Opportunities in EC

• How do I go about setting up a new business on the Internet?

• Where do I try to locate it so as to get maximum exposure to the targeted customer base?

• How should I define a product line that can be readily differentiated from competing offers which can be rapidly accessed and demonstrated over the Internet?

Research and Education Opportunities in EC

• What sorts of barriers to the entry of competitors or competing products can be rapidly erected and affordably sustained?

• What are representative strategies for achieving or sustaining competitive advantage in open electronic markets that otherwise can quickly be reduced to simple price-based competition?

Research and Education Opportunities in EC

• What kinds of financial controls and performance measurements are needed to manage Internet-based business activity costs?

• What kinds of billing systems and payment schemes will offer the greatest flexibility in managing cash-flow while maximizing customer satisfaction?

Research and Education Opportunities in EC

• We need to adopt, implement, and proliferate the use of experimental learning laboratories for trying out new forms of EC

• ELLs can serve as testbeds for computational business processes for EC.

• ELLs can be developed for each of the academic, corporate, and government markets.

Conclusions

• The current emphasis of EC is on investments in technology, rather than into the supporting business processes.

• The lessons of good business management are not well addressed, compared to the technical problems and solutions pertaining to the information infrastructure for EC.

Conclusions

• There are substantial R&D opportunities in figuring out how to model, integrate, and enact inter-organizational business processes for use in EC information infrastructures.