Making business sense of electronic commerce

Electronic commerce is possibly the most promising information technology application that enterprises have seen in recent years. It has revolutionized supply-chain management and has enormous potential for retail merchandising and brokerages. These benefits do not come without careful planning, however. Most of the business community acknowledges that intensive use of any information technology means transforming the current, often core, business models and processes. The array of solutions can be daunting. E-commerce implementation alone offers a potpourri of special-purpose hardware servers and the attendant distributed computing software solutions, Internet networking protocols, and transaction management technologies. Moreover some technologies are in their infancy. Distributed software component models such as Microsoft's DCOM (Distributed Common Object Model) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) continue to evolve rapidly. This article shows the depth and scope of the decision-making process that accompanies e-commerce adoption. The authors mention specific strategies and tools.