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E-Commerce Architecture
The Importance of Architecture The Brooklyn Bridge took thirteen years to build. An architecture was used to guide the work breakdown whereby separate components were constructed in various locations and assembled into the growing superstructure called a bridge. The architecture - the overarching design - provided the cohesion and coherence of the components so that their assembly would result in a complete, whole bridge.
Like the Brooklyn Bridge, an overarching design is needed to guide the construction and assembly of e-Commerce initiatives into the growing superstructure called a digital enterprise. Unlike the Brooklyn Bridge where traffic could not commence until the entire structure was constructed, the digital enterprise need not be fully built before a company can implement its digital business initiatives. Business goals, objectives and constraints will determine which initiatives and how much infrastructure will be implemented at each step along the way. Developing a solid business and technology architecture is hard work but results provide the cohesion and coherence needed so that as a company's e-Commerce initiatives grow, they fit in and interact with the growing superstructure of the fully digital enterprise.
Corporations and their value-chains are large, dynamic and complex systems. Further, they must evolve within even larger systems including the industries in which they participate and the overall economy. Large, complex and rapidly changing are three facts of life for the corporation and its business ecosystem. Given these fundamental characteristics, how does a company manage its business and its technology? Business and technology leaders have grappled with the complexity of enterprise-class information systems for some years. They have learned that an architectural approach is essential to conceiving, designing, building and maintaining these large and complex business systems. The design goal of an enterprise architecture, containing robust and interchangeable business and technology elements, is to provide a coherent framework for managing complexity and change.
An enterprise architecture provides the blueprints, the structural abstractions, and style that rationalize, arrange and connect business and technology components to achieve a corporation's purpose - now and in the future. All businesses have an architecture, albeit implicit. The components usually include past, present, and next generations of business policies and processes as well as past, present, and next generations of technologies. For example, adding new electronic sales channels with their unique policies and processes requires that a company continue supporting present sales channels while incorporating the new processes and systems of the new channels.
Without explicit enterprise architecture, chaos will reign. Business and technology changes are certain, and thus an enterprise architecture must provide a framework for change. The changes that result from designing new business models or from adopting new technologies should not hinder the other. Thus change itself is one of the strategic goals of enterprise architecture and enterprise architectures must be living documents.
While a complete discussion of best-practice enterprise architecture is beyond the scope of this book, the suggested readings will be useful to those readers who are new to architecture-centric business and technology processes and methods. The focus here moves beyond enterprise architecture to inter-enterprise architecture. The first principles of enterprise architecture are extended to form an overarching structure for the business and technology components needed at the boundaries between and among enterprises: customers, suppliers and trading partners.
In addition to the elements of enterprise-scale architecture, inter-enterprise architecture adds new dimensions, challenges, and complexity. At the boundaries, technologies and business models are not only disparate, they are beyond the control of any one participant. Thus rules of engagement must accommodate collaborative integration that maintains the integrity of the participants' business policies and processes. These rules of engagement, because they are in the nether land between participants, must be explicit, unambiguous and universally agreed to - in short, they must be based on standards.
Standards are essential to inter-enterprise architecture and those standards must include both technology standards (e.g.. XML, EJB, COM+, and CORBA) and business standards (e.g. OFX for payments, OBI for open MRO procurement, ICE for information content exchange, and SWAP for Simple Workflow Access Protocol). Third wave companies have learned that e-Commerce has so many facets that reach into the core of the business that its architecture should mirror that of not only the enterprise, but of the business ecosystem in which it lives. Thus, standards-based inter-enterprise architecture is the linchpin of third wave e-Commerce.
The problem with standards, of course, is that there are so many de facto and de jour standards from which to choose. The best strategy is to pay close attention to standards most relevant to a company's industry and to adopt open standards, where possible, or to migrate to open standards when they become available. Open standards provide the greatest opportunity to achieve the critical goals of portability and interoperability. Standards are integral components in a sound inter-enterprise architecture. The well designed architecture should be able to accommodate change in its standards related components.
The task of transitioning to a digital enterprise is, of course, not a single event. It will not happen overnight or be implemented as a “project” to be handled by the IS staff. Companies are not changing their information systems, they are changing the very way they conduct business, the way they operate. E-Commerce is first and foremost the extension of business, not technology. The nature, size and sheer complexity of building the ultimate digital enterprise demands that companies develop an overall inter-enterprise architecture, and implement the architecture's components in a step-wise fashion. Because of the absolute need for quality in each component in these mission critical systems, business and software engineering disciplines are essential. Architecture and these engineering disciplines are the keys to building the ubiquitous business.
Inter-enterprise Architecture
Jim Champy, known for helping to launch the business process reengineering (BPR) revolution, describes this new age of logistics. “Re-engineering has been mostly about breakthroughs in getting the right stuff out the door. But there are huge productivity gains left in processes that link companies to their suppliers and customers. It goes well beyond the outsourcing of a single function, and it will be driven by the need to deliver a higher level of customer service than a single company can. To make all this work, a company's technology architecture now will have to encompass what's external as well as internal to its operation.”
People, process and technology are the ingredients of business architecture. As shown in Figure1, inter-enterprise architecture addresses “process” from three key perspectives: existing business processes (and the systems that implement them), value-chain processes, and customer-facing processes. For companies that have changed from product-centric to customer-centric, customer-facing processes serve as the capstone, binding together all other elements of the architecture. By focusing first and foremost on customer-facing processes, context is provided for the other components of the architecture: technology and people.
Inter-Enterprise Architecture
At the center of the architecture, emphasis is given to value-chain processes which are the essence of business-to-business e-Commerce. Having determined the requirements, goals and constraints of customer-facing processes, architecting value-chain processes is a matter of reconciling and optimizing the value delivered by a company's trading partners and its existing business processes. Value-chain processes will likely be subject to new forms of electronic mediation and aggregation different to those in the physical, paper-based world. An early effort aimed at these notions is Hewlett-Packard's e-Services. Industry analyst Patricia Seybold explains, “We're about to embark on a new era in which most companies will begin to focus on a few very strategic business processes. Innovative companies will package up their strategic processes as services that can be provided and/or launched via the Internet. Soon, many business-to-business activities will be handled by a series of e-services locating one another, negotiating with one another, and handling each other's requests.” Service-oriented, inter-enterprise architectures are essential to value-chain innovation. The foundation for a company to participate in new value chain structures and processes is a company's existing business processes and systems. They must be adapted to participate in the new service-based systems.
Together, these three process architectures identify how the people and technology pillars need to be realigned to support successful e-Commerce transitions and programs. Corporations will have to adopt new technologies and transition staff to new roles and new skills. An overall inter-enterprise architecture allows change to be carefully managed by explicitly identifying those facets (architectural elements) that need to be monitored and controlled as a company transitions to and manages e-Commerce as a new platform for business.