New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
College of Computing Sciences (CCS)
CIS485-451
& CIS 786-851: World Wide Web Standards, Fall 2001
Professor: Michael
Bieber
Class Quick Links: [Home] [Schedule] [WebBoard] [Standards] [Definitions/Links] [Homeworks]
This semester, we shall be using three on-going case studies. When the standards teams are presenting their particular standards, part of the job will be describing how their standard could apply to each of the three cases.
The three cases will be described in this Web page.
E-procurement is the Internet-based technology to automate the acquisition and management of goods and services. Some of the benefits companies have recognized through the use of e-procurement technologies include a 73% reduction in transaction costs, a 70% to 80% reduction in purchase order processing cycles and a 5% to 10% reduction in prices paid. Based on these findings, an average mid size organization can expect to save almost $2 million per year through the use of e-procurement technologies. Other advantages of e-procurement are that it provides governments with improved cost analysis. It allows them to establish jurisdiction-wide systems that force agencies to adhere to a standards-based approach that is embodied in the Internet.
No best-in-class e-procurement solution has gained widespread adoption in the state and local marketplace. One emerging trend in e-procurement is the ability of contractors to supply one or more functional components that a government customer would request for its e-procurement system. Functional components include e-catalogs, e-malls and marketplaces, asset and inventory management and vendor management and registration. Not everybody is asking for the same thing [1].
E-procurement software can be used as a stand-alone system and is also capable of integrating with a suitable back-office system. E-procurement handles a company's full procurement cycle - from requisitioning to purchase orders, delivery confirmation and purchase order/delivery matching for invoice clearance.
E-procurement can generate substantial savings and efficiencies across the organization without having to re-engineer the underlying business processes.
The benefits of e-procurement include:
- Increased savings on purchased items.- Ability to negotiate volume discounts on purchases.
- Lower transaction costs.
- Elimination of duplicate and maverick buying.
- Reduction of stock levels due to faster cycle times.
- Reduce ordering cycle time.
- Ability to manage product databases.
- Integration with other enterprise applications.
With e-procurement becoming increasingly adopted by large enterprises and small businesses in almost every industry, the challenge is to implement and enforce global e-procurement standards that are flexible enough to ensure growth while simultaneously allowing for interoperability between e-marketplaces. The advent of universal e-procurement standards will ensure that all vendors and industries conform to a uniform language used throughout private e-exchanges and public e-marketplaces.
For example, the Baan e-procurement software has five main components [2]:
But while the Internet enables a wide range of communication from electronic mail to video and audio, it falls short when it comes to business documents. This is because, unlike the multimedia content carried by the Internet, business document orders, invoices, payment authorities and so on are formatted in many ways. If for e.g., a manufacturer orders products from a subcontractor each requires the order information in different formats to comply with their IT systems. Although the manufacturer could send the order data using the Internet, it is unlikely that the subcontractor's system could make sense of it. Clearly this is a significant obstacle to the growth of electronic trading exchanges or e-markets.
A legitimate reason, companies have for not moving their supply chain process to the Internet is that many have already invested in EDI. EDI was, at one time, how organizations shared information on orders, inventory and product availability with their suppliers and customers. The problem with EDI, though, is that its cost made it practical for only the largest of companies.
There has been some automation of those interactions with EDI, but very little. The reasons for that boil down to the fact that it's expensive software to implement and the standards are not very flexible. This is why Internet-based supply chain applications have eclipsed EDI in popularity. IDC says the market for Internet-based procurement software was approximately $770 million in 1999 and predicts that it will grow to about $9 billion in 2004. As a result, companies are lining up to offer Web-based procurement products. Companies such as Oracle Corp., i2 Technologies Inc., Ariba Inc., CommerceOne Inc. and SAP AG have products that fall into this space [3].
Both the Government and industry are facing a great opportunity to improve the way we do business. While the move to e-commerce will be driven by the market, government has an important part to play to facilitate the transition. Successful implementation of e-procurement will have an exemplary effect and spur on the development of electronic trading communities within the economy. It will require concerted action by buyers and suppliers to realize the opportunities provided by e-procurement and to be able to utilize it to it full potential by adhering to market standards.
[1] Buying Into E-Procurement, Samuel Greengard, Business Finance Magazine.
[2] http://www.baan.com.
[3] New IDC study presents the experiences of early adopters of e-procurement services, International Data Corporation, BMI-Techknowledge.
- http://www.sap.com/solutions/e-procurement/.
- http://www.sas.com/offices/europe/uk/solutions/srm.html.
- Global E-Procurement Standards: The Next Step Toward Seamless Supply Chain Management, Jay Ryan Vice President of Supply Chain Solutions, Dun & Bradstreet, eSolutions World.
- http://www.timeinc.net/fortune/sections/eprocurement/.
Web/Internet Banking refers to the use of the Internet as a remote delivery channel for banking services. Such services include traditional ones, such as opening a deposit account or transferring funds among different accounts and new banking services such as electronic bill presentment and payment. Banks offer Internet banking in two main ways. An existing bank with physical offices can establish a web site and offer Internet banking to its customers in addition to its traditional delivery channels. A second alternative is to establish a virtual, branch-less or an Internet-only bank. The computer server that lies at the heart of a virtual bank may be housed in an office that serves as the legal address of such as bank or at some other location. Virtual banks may offer their customers the ability to make deposits and withdraw funds via ATMs or other remote delivery channels owned by other institutions.
Essentially, any regular bank offers three types of services:
But one might have to make an appointment or worse stand in a long queue. Online banks alleviate these problems by currently offering:
In addition, they also offer:
Banks should have proper infrastructure and schedules for backing up data. The backed-up data should be periodically tested to ensure recovery without loss of transactions in a time frame as given out in the bank's security policy. Business continuity should be ensured by setting up disaster recovery sites. These facilities should also be tested periodically. All applications of banks should have proper record keeping facilities for legal purposes. It may be necessary to keep all received and sent messages both in encrypted and decrypted form. Security infrastructure should be properly tested before using the systems and applications for normal operations. Banks should upgrade the systems by installing patches released by developers to remove bugs and loopholes and upgrade to newer versions that give better security and control.
Financial EDI (FEDI) is the process of integrating payments with the commercial transmission of sales, inventory and production of information. For example, when a customer purchases a tool at a retail chain store, inventory management information is generated within the store from the point-of-sale terminal and the electronic equivalent of a purchase order is transmitted to the toolmaker. The toolmaker ships the tools and electronically sends an invoice to the store. When the store receives the invoice, that information is routed to its accounts payable. At this point, the EDI transaction becomes a FEDI transaction if payment instructions are electronically transmitted to the store's bank. The bank in turn makes an ACH payment to the toolmaker. In a variation on this procedure, payment instructions could go to an EDI-capable non-bank entity, which would arrange for payment to be made instead of the bank playing this role. Ultimately, the store's account will be debited by the bank. Many of the costs of becoming EDI-capable are related to one-time set-up costs. These fixed costs are offset by the increasing efficiency of information flows. The greater the number of transactions that can be completed using EDI, the greater are the efficiency gains and the more likely these gains will offset the set-up costs. This is an example of what economists refer to as "network externalities", where the value of a firm adopting EDI is positively related to the number of other firms that have adopted this technology.
Wireless banking will have a slow subscriber adoption rate at first. It will accelerate rapidly when digital wireless areas expand and additional functionality is provided for wireless banking. Wireless customers use their user ID and password just as they do for regular e-Banking. A customer simply logs through their Internet enabled cell phone at any time from any place. Wireless banking could include the following functions:
1. http://www.web-banking-online.com/
2. Marquette Banks to Launch Entire Total Web Banking Suite from Home Financial Network, Business Wire, Westport Conn, May 1999.
4. Wells Fargo, Standards-based Electronic Bill Presentation and Payment (EBPP), Sun MicroSystems Case Study.
5. Special Studies on Technology and Banking; Technological Innovation in Banking and Payments: Industry Trends and Implications for Banks; Karen Furst, William W. Lang, Daniel E. Nolle; MIS Quarterly; Vol. 17; Sep. 1998.
6. http://www.thebankingchannel.com/.
7. Wireless Web Banking Invades Chicago's ESPN Zone, Mar 2000, MediaLink.com News.
8. Tennessee Bank Pioneers Wireless Web Banking, Mary Norton-Miller.
9. http://www.franklinnetbranch.com.
This is a scenario we are proposing as a research project at NJIT...
Our research aims to increase knowledge-workers' effectiveness by helping them share knowledge and learn through participation in virtual communities. Virtuality has several definitions. For some, it indicates distance, requiring collaborators to communicate asynchronously ("different time, different place"). For some, it expresses the ability of computers to represent information in ways different from reality, with new tools allowing a broad range of different people to understand complex or conceptual information and participate in exploring it. For some, it indicates an organizational (or community) structure that is flexible enough to optimize individual and group performance under new and changing conditions. For some, it creates a sense of sharing experiences and perspectives, and emotional support between people working towards similar goals or solving problems together). In our view, participation in virtual communities should involve all these characteristics.
The World Wide Web opened up new possibilities for people to collaborate. Even so, knowledge-workers and society are not benefiting nearly as much as they could from access to other people and knowledge. Properly supported virtual communities could benefit society through collaboration and knowledge-sharing in ways not yet articulated. To realize this objective, we need to investigate how to design and manage virtual communities to promote knowledge-sharing and learning by individuals, groups and the community as a whole.
In this paper, we describe a set of tools for community knowledge, learning and sharing support. These tools provide a vehicle for examining community development and participants' interactions.
To facilitate knowledge sharing and learning, we propose an initial set of integrated tools for virtual community support, which includes (1) discussion (2) graphical concept mapping, (3) advanced hypermedia features, (4) community process support, and (5) digital video for collaboration and learning. The integration of these components will represent a major advance. Whenever possible, we propose the use of existing technologies and systems and emerging WWW standards.
Discussion tools include systems like WebBoard, where people participate at different times (asynchronously) and chat rooms, where people talk synchronously, or at the same time.
Concepts maps are diagrams that express how a particular person (or group) views concept. Generally a person will draw some squares and circles connected by lines, and then label all of these. As they say, a picture (or diagram) is worth 1000 words.
Hypermedia links represent relationships. Hypermedia navigation, structuring and annotation features, such as user-declared linking, comments, trails, guided tours, and structural search all provide ways of representing, conveying and sharing knowledge.
A community's processes encapsulate knowledge about how to foster useful collaboration, perform tasks and achieve goals. Making these processes explicit and encouraging discussion about them will enable participants both to learn how to get things done more effectively and to evolve these processes over time.
Process modeling and execution encompasses a spectrum of process types. These range from simple repetitive processes that are addressed by conventional workflow management systems, to knowledge and communication intensive activities such as design, software development, and business decision making that are addressed by "ad hoc" workflow systems. At the structured end of the spectrum there are processes such as adding documents to the library and managing the review process for a conference. Structured workflows will also help community members execute a disciplined approach for maintaining the graphical concept maps whereby suggested changes are automatically routed to responsible community members for approval and buy-in. For these structured processes, we would need reusable workflow templates to guide users, route communications, monitor progress, send reminders, and provide an audit trail.
Digital video opens up new possibilities for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and learning. Video can save time in communication. It can represent knowledge in ways no other medium can. While video has the draw-back of requiring participants to be co-present, it appears to help support trust development between people who meet for the first time, which makes later asynchronous textual communication easier.