Marketplace and technology standards for B2B e-commerce: progress, challenges, and the state of the art
Introduction
For more than three decades, businesses have been using electronic mechanisms to exchange transaction data. Standards have played an integral role in the success of some e-commerce architectures. Here, we propose and discuss a set of standards required in any EC platform. We also evaluate past and current architectures against these standards.
The development and implementation of standards and technologies have accelerated over the past 15 years. A seminal event in this evolution was the development of electronic data interchange (EDI), whereby trading partners established standard formats for the exchange of electronic documents to facilitate electronic transactions [45]. Today, the emerging set of technologies referred to collectively as Web Services has the potential to extend the reach of EC.
Web Services offers many advantages not found in earlier technologies, but the technology has yet to realize its potential because of the lack of standards. The development and adoption of these could allow Web Services to meet the needs of a broader range of EC transactions, including B2C, B2B, C2C, and peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions.
This study focuses on B2B transactions. Although there are different definitions of EC [33], [39], it is generally acknowledged that B2B accounts for the largest dollar volume of EC, with approximately US$ 700 billion in transactions in 2001. The Gartner Group estimated that by 2005 all types of EC transactions will exceed US$ 8.5 trillion, 90% of which will be B2B transactions [30]. Similarly, Jupiter Research estimated that the combination of B2B and B2C EC transactions will surpass US$ 7 trillion by 2005 [21].
Some businesses have engaged in EDI for a number of years. This has occurred when one business transmitted computer-readable data transactions in a standard format to another business. EDI standards captured the same information that businesses have traditionally included in paper transaction documents. Yet EDI was designed to support business transactions between sets of known trading partners [36]; it did not facilitate discovery of new vendors—a significant limitation for firms that wished to extend their reach to new participants in a broader marketplace.
Subsequently, the World Wide Web has enabled businesses to share documents across a generalized, global network. In several ways, it facilitated EC: sellers have been able to publish company and product information via their Websites, and to some degree, search engines have allowed buyers to find and analyze this information. Yet such searches are not reliable because of the diverse systems and data presentations. Moreover, sellers on the WWW generally do not use industry-wide standard transaction templates for accessing product information and executing purchase transactions. This has limited the ability of automated services to find sellers and conduct automated transactions.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the evolution of EDI and the WWW, together with a new set of technologies, has the potential to provide a more robust and powerful platform for EC than exists today. If supported by appropriate EC-supporting standards, this platform could enable buyers and sellers to find each other more easily and exchange product and service information with more precision and reliability than today. This portends a ubiquitous generalized marketplace that will have attributes of EDI, the WWW, and other evolving EC technologies.
Section snippets
e-Commerce enabling standards
For purposes of evaluation, we propose eight EC-enabling standards (Fig. 1). We evaluate current and past EC technologies based on these. They can be grouped into three areas: foundation technology standards, marketplace standards, and commerce services and applications.
Current technologies: strengths and limitations
Fig. 2 illustrates connections between objects in EC technology platforms including EDI, Websites, B2B hubs, e-Procurement systems, and Web Services supporting B2B.
Table 1 summarizes the technologies and standards used by each architecture. Their strengths and weaknesses are shown in Table 2.
Web Services
This platform takes advantage of the ubiquity of the WWW by using, XML, and UDDI. Web Services use open standards and have been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [49]. Web Services focus mainly on data type standards, schema expression languages, and common communication methods. While UDDI attempts to meet the needs in the middle layers (categorization, schemas, and transaction templates), it does not provide sufficient support. In order to meet all the requirements for a
Conclusion
This paper has presented evidence of the need for common or shared marketplace and technology standards through examining and contrasting the major platforms that have been developed to enable EC. We have found that no single technology provides a complete solution for all components of a standardized, loosely coupled marketplace. Each platform has strengths and weaknesses.
One author recently spoke with a senior executive at a large manufacturer about the possibility of EC with accurate,
Acknowledgement
The Rollins Center for eBusiness at Brigham Young University helped fund this study.
Conan C. Albrecht is an Assistant Professor and Rollins Fellow at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He researches computer-related fraud detection, collaborative computing, peer-to-peer architectures, and network programming. He has developed three groupware systems to research group dynamics, and he is currently creating open source software to make fraud detection within corporate systems more available to auditors and fraud detectives. His work has been published
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Conan C. Albrecht is an Assistant Professor and Rollins Fellow at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He researches computer-related fraud detection, collaborative computing, peer-to-peer architectures, and network programming. He has developed three groupware systems to research group dynamics, and he is currently creating open source software to make fraud detection within corporate systems more available to auditors and fraud detectives. His work has been published in Decision Support Systems, The Journal of Forensic Accounting, The Communications of the ACM, and Expert Systems with Applications.
Douglas L. Dean is an Associate Professor and David and Knight Fellow at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He is also the research coordinator at the Rollins eBusiness Center at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Arizona in 1995. His research interests include electronic commerce technology and strategy, software project management, requirements analysis, and collaborative tools and methods. His work has been published in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Data Base, Group Decision and Negotiation, Expert Systems with Applications, and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.
James V. Hansen is Glen Ardis Professor in the Information Systems Group of the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle. He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, and Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management, and is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering. His research interests are in machine learning and agent-based systems, with recent publications appearing in Computers and Operations Research, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, and Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.