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.
