Architectural Issues of Web‐enabled Electronic Business

Citation

Mason, D. (2004), "Architectural Issues of Web‐enabled Electronic Business", Online Information Review, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 80-81. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520410522484

The world is getting wired up. Simple, permanent connections between every business and every consumer worldwide will create new and startling opportunities for those businesses ready to exploit them. Organisations that fail to adapt quickly will die.

Gradually, and largely unremarked, a quiet revolution has already happened – the ordinary desktop PC has evolved into a multifunction communications device. Thanks to the Internet, every PC is capable of communicating with every other communications device. We are accustomed to data exchange between desktop and portable computers, but that is only the beginning. A wide variety of hand‐held devices is elbowing in via the airwaves to create a seamless global network of PCs, mobile phones, PDAs and so on. These will soon be joined by an even smaller micro‐device called a smart tag or RDIF, small enough and cheap enough to attach to pallet loads of products and even sewn into garments. These devices already exist and are all around you. They are tiny cell‐phones, miniature radio devices that perform simple functions like measuring temperature and humidity, or reading GPS to find out where they are. Think of them as intelligent, talking bar codes. So stock taking in a factory becomes a case of walking through the stockroom with a hand‐held computer and asking the pallets of frozen peas to transmit where they are and what their temperature is, and where they are supposed to be going. In the upmarket Prada stores, when a customer takes a garment into the fitting room it transmits its ID and as the customer is trying on the garment a screen displays matching accessories in stock.

None of this is going to be easy to manage. Every book, every product will be data aware. Unlimited data access needs organisations and workers capable of envisioning how to use the data, how to store it and how and when to share it. Internet technologies will play a critical role in this, and the key to success lies in designing the right Web architecture with the right methodologies and tools.

The aim of this book is to give a general overview of current Internet technology and e‐business issues. The editors invited experts in various disciplines to contribute chapters on a wide range of topics and then rigorously pared these down to the final 26 chapters presented. The book is organised into nine sections: Globalization of e‐business (two chapters), Intelligent portal architectures (two), Scalability and performance issues (two), Data mining (two), Searching and retrieval methods (four), Internet information systems (six), e‐Marketing (four), Architecture security (two), and e‐Business applications (two). Each of the chapters offers a substantial treatment of its topic, well researched and of high scholarly standard. The general tone of the contributions is more towards the computer science end of the scale, and the detailed and sometimes mathematical treatment of some topics may not be entirely comfortable for managers without a technical background. That said, the chapters are of uniformly high quality, and technical specialists will appreciate the many examples of algorithm code and snippets of XML provided as illustration in many of the chapters. The contributors are mostly academics, and the collection is notable for its variety of application types and geographic spread, with case studies from many parts of the world. The book is also notable for being up to date in a rapidly changing field and achieving an acceptable balance between theoretical research pieces and practical applications.

This is excellent book, well thought out, well planned, and well presented. The editors have taken a difficult set of technical topics and produced a high quality, accessible collection of useful, relevant papers.