发信人: jhyn()
整理人: aokven(2002-11-15 14:00:48), 站内信件
|
STRUCTURE AND MACRO-LEVEL IMPACTS OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE: FROM TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE TO ELECTRONIC MARKETPLACES
VLADIMIR ZWASS
Abstract
Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks. Traditional E-commerce, conducted with the use of information technologies centering on electronic data interchange (EDI) over proprietary value-added networks, is rapidly moving to the Internet. The Internet抯 World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary E-commerce, which has been vastly broadened and redefined by the use of the new medium. The paper presents a hierarchical framework of E-commerce, consisting of three meta-levels: infrastructure, services, and products and structures, which meta-levels, in turn, consist of seven functional levels. These levels of E-commerce development, as well as of its analysis, range from the wide-area telecommunications infrastructure to electronic marketplaces and electronic hierarchies. The paper proceeds to discuss several nodal areas of E-commerce impact on the activities at the meta-levels. These impact areas are: integrating electronic payment into the buying process, building a consumer marketplace, moving supply chains and products into the marketspace, the governance of electronic business, and the new intermediation. A perspective for further analysis of these impacts is provided.
Key words and phrases: electronic commerce, information infrastructure, World Wide Web, electronic marketplaces, electronic hierarchies, supply-chain management, new intermediation.
I. Introduction: From Traditional to Internet-Driven Electronic Commerce
As electronic commerce is being redefined by the dynamics of the Internet, we wish to analyze the present structure of the enterprise defined by this term, and to look forward to future developments. We shall thus present a hierarchical framework for electronic commerce, within which we shall analytically survey the mutually reinforcing changes in the business practices and in the underlying information technologies.
Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is the sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks. In today抯 business environment, where the operational boundaries between firms have become fluid, it is often both pragmatically and analytically unfruitful to separate the interorganizational business processes from the intraorganizational ones. Therefore, in our understanding, E-commerce includes the relationships and transactions between companies, as well as the corporate processes that support the commerce within individual firms.
Electronic commerce is a new and certainly trendy name, but the practice it refers to originated a half century ago in the Berlin airlift (Seideman, 1996). This practice became electronic data interchange (EDI), the computer-to-computer exchange of standardized electronic transaction documents. Although what can now be called traditional E-commerce has not been limited to EDI and has included business practices built around computer-to-computer transmissions of variety of message forms, bar codes, and files, the use of EDI has arguably led to the most significant organizational transformations and market initiatives (see, for example, Jelassi & Figon, 1994). Some of the well known cases in point are Wal-Mart, Levi Strauss, General Motors, and other companies that have built new kinds of relationships with their suppliers and customers through bilateral electronic linkages. Electronic integration, supported by EDI and other information technologies, drastically reduces time and space buffers that shelter a firm, but that also limit its competitive opportunities.
Electronic integration has led to dramatic shifts in the definition of a firm, with the emergence of virtual companies, whose capabilities to deliver their products to the market are defined largely by their ability to organize and maintain a network of business relationships, rather than by their ability to manufacture a product or deliver a service. Extensive business networks have been formed by relying on this form of integration; the local and global business communities using TradeNet in Singapore can serve as an example (and have done so - to the authorities of the Port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands, for instance). Entire industries are being radically changed; the U.S. grocery retailing, for instance, is being reshaped by the EDI-based Efficient Consumer Response initiative, expected to save tens of billions of dollars in the distribution channel ("H.E. Butt," 1994). To understand and rationalize the operations of an individual firm, it is now necessary to study the business networks in which the firm is embedded.
It is the arrival of the commercial use of the Internet, driven by its World Wide Web subset, that has been defining new E-commerce since 1993.1 E-commerce now emerges from the convergence of several major information technologies and business practices. Among the principal technologies directly enabling modern E-commerce are: computer networking and telecommunications; client/server computing; multimedia, and hypermedia in particular; information retrieval systems; electronic data interchange (EDI); message handling and workflow management systems; groupware and electronic meeting systems; and public key cryptography. In a broader sense, all the major computer and telecommunications technologies, and database management in particular, undergird E-commerce. The set of technologies driving E-commerce is embodied (for a want of a better word) today in the Internet. This conglomerate is a transformational technology (in the sense of Fedorowicz & Konsynski, 1994) that has challenged old assumptions and helps shape new workplaces, organizations, and markets. The Internet offers an open platform for new E-commerce, removing the long lead times, asset specificity, and bilaterality of E-commerce based on the traditional proprietary EDI.
It would be entirely wrong to interpret E-commerce as a largely technological development. This way of doing business can be understood as the deployment of information technologies together with the organizational and management advances that pull the technology and are pushed by it in turn. Team-centered work organization with international teams working around the clock if desired, telework, moving products and operations to virtual value chains, demassing the firm by building it around core competencies, and transnational organizations are some of these advances. In the process of creative destruction described by Schumpeter (1950/1975), the use of transformational technologies challenges the pre-existing ways of doing business, of collaborating, and of competing. In a wider realm, the underlying technology of global, accessible, and non-proprietary connectivity changes many aspects of our life in the public and private domains.
The paper first presents a systematic view of the complex enterprise of E-commerce within a hierarchical framework, extending from the networking infrastructure to global marketplaces. It then analyzes some of the nodal impacts of E-commerce, relating them to this framework.. A number of open questions emerge from this analysis.
|
|