The Inter-enterprise Process Engineering Process

Transitioning to e-Commerce

Key Processes of E-Commerce Program Management

Both program and project management are needed to oversee the development and growth of e-Commerce initiatives. Program management involves three critical processes: building shared vision, conducting gap analysis and building inter-enterprise work teams.

1. Build Inter-enterprise Shared Vision through Education. A picture of the future is required if a company is to know where it is going and what it is trying to build. Corporations cannot possibly arrive at their destinations if they do not have a clear vision of where that is. Few concepts are more mysterious than corporate vision: shared visions are not pearls of wisdom handed down from an enlightened CEO. Instead, shared vision bubbles up from individual vision - from customers, suppliers and individual employees. Shared vision brings about common directions, focus, and the motivation for personal, team and organizational learning. With genuine shared vision, not imposed corporate vision statements, all workers across the organizations of inter-enterprise endeavors are able to keep their eyes on the prize. 

2. Conduct Inter-enterprise Architectural Assessments and Gap Analysis. Peter Senge is Director of the Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning Program at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Senge calls systems thinking the "5th discipline" and the cornerstone of the learning organization. To be successful, e-Commerce teams must be masters of general systems thinking. 

Systems thinking provides a new perspective to business process analysis and redesign. For example, can you imagine holding up your hand a foot before your face and blocking your view of the earth, the entire earth? Astronauts have been able to do that. The world looks drastically different from their perspective. They see the whole earth. Unfortunately, we only see bits and pieces of our company and industry in our earthly day-to-day work. Today's businesses need an astronaut's perspective of whole, end-to-end, value-chain processes. Systems thinking is a formal discipline of management science that deals with whole systems and with the interconnections and interactions of the individual parts. Systems thinking is also a learning method. Business team members can make assumptions about improved business processes and test those assumptions with the systems model. Feedback closes the loop and causes learning.

If it ain't broke, break it. One of the key principles of systems thinking and architecture is to envision what could be in a perfect world. Then, the real world is assessed against the desired state. The resulting gap analysis is used to plan the resources and tasks needed to reach the desired state in the desired timeframe. Innovative business processes are not extensions of existing processes, they are discovered by new ways of thinking, unencumbered by entrenched mental models and ways of conducting work.

Applying the first principles of systems thinking, e-Commerce teams can analyze the entire business ecosystem and discover opportunities for breakthrough value propositions made possible by the e-Commerce business platform. The analysis will focus on the new business capabilities afforded by the Net:
 

 What is it that we can now do that we couldn't do before the availability of the Net? 

  Who is our current and future e-Commerce customer? 

  What can and should we outsource to our customers? 

  How can we add compelling value to our present and future customers? 

  How would we design a value-chain if were just starting a business, a digital business? 

  Should we cannibalize our own business? 

  How should we reintermediate our present and future value-chain? What roles should we play: standalone web site, aggregator, open I-market, supply-chain portal? 

  How deeply do we integrate business processes in our new value chains: data handoffs, process handoffs, or shared real-time processes? 

  What e-Commerce competitive threats do we face? 

  What is the readiness of our trading partners to participate in e-Commerce? 

  How does e-Commerce change our pricing policies? 

  How can we create or play a leading role in communities-of-interest? 

  What customer touch points do we need to reach now and in the future? 

  Should we create niche portals that may even host our competitors? 

  What organizational and ownership forms should we create? 

  What are the people and technology requirements of the new architecture?

These questions guide the assessment of inter-enterprise architecture from two perspectives. First, a green field or "could be" architecture is envisioned and documented. Then current architectural elements can be documented, providing a description of the "as is" architecture. Gap analysis then ensues, revealing the people, processes and technology needed to implement elements of the new architecture. The result of assessment and gap analysis forms the basis for developing an initial strategic (strategy) plan for e-Commerce. 

3. Build Inter-enterprise Organizations and Work Teams. Peter Senge asserts it is possible to create learning organizations. In addition to the cornerstone, systems thinking, he describes four other core disciplines required to build such an organization.6 The core disciplines include personal mastery, working with mental models, building shared vision, and team learning. These disciplines are not necessarily in the policy manuals of personnel departments of today's corporations nor in the realm of our individual thinking. They are, however, central to the success of e-Commerce in the new business ecosystem. 

With the focus on general systems thinking and an architecture-centric approach to systems development, the tasks, knowledge and skills inherent in e-Commerce environments can be packaged into new roles and organizations for handling the work responsibilities. A few of the new roles are highlighted below, although a much longer list can be associated with architecture-based development of e-Commerce systems: reuse managers, quality assurance managers, configuration management specialists, business object modelers, object-oriented programmers and Internet technology specialists. If a company already has adopted object-oriented development approaches, many of the needed roles are probably already in place. After exploring some of the new roles we can then look at how e-Commerce affects organizational design. 

E-Commerce Program Managers have line authority over enterprise-wide e-Commerce initiatives and projects. They are tasked with e-Commerce integration and managing an overall business and technology architecture and infrastructure. They are senior-level line managers who are effective at bridging the divides between business and technology units within an organization and across the extended enterprise. 

Enterprise Architects define, align and refine the overall inter-enterprise architecture. They carry out many of the tasks of program management and provide guidance so individual projects can make optimum use of infrastructure resources for e-Commerce. They do the balancing act between business requirements and technological capabilities. On individual projects, enterprise architects help identify the requirements, goals and constraints of the project. They allocate responsibilities for each of the architectural elements and coordinate the modeling and design activities for the overall enterprise architecture. They are the chief architects of e-Commerce and coordinate the work information, infrastructure and application architects. 

All architects and modelers should be completely versed in design patterns common to the many facets of business and technology. The design pattern movement has affected all aspects of analysis, design, and implementation of component-based systems. Design patterns are the reusable material of architecture and represent a watershed in the way complex, distributed information systems are conceived and developed. Much of the activity in software design patterns reflects the work of Christopher Alexander who developed the first principles of the discipline in relation to building architecture. 

Business and Information Architects are steeped in business domain knowledge including business processes and logical information structures. They coordinate the work of business and technology analysts and modelers who develop abstract representations or business object models of the subjects, rules, roles, events, tasks, activities and policies of the business domain. Business object models describe a logical domain irrespective of applications. Such application-neutral models enable the reuse of business engineering analysis and design patterns and artifacts. 

Infrastructure Architects identify the technical services required of the technology infrastructure to empower and support the logical business and information architecture. They evaluate existing infrastructure services, select those appropriate to a given project and acquire (via build or buy) new components needed in the infrastructure. They oversee the work of technical specialists in modeling the services architecture of the technical infrastructure. They maintain the technical components of the development repository. 

Application Architects coordinate the business process modeling activities across multiple projects and business domains. They coordinate the work of domain modelers and maintain the repository of business and component models. They evaluate existing business component services, select those appropriate to a given project and acquire (via build or buy) new components needed in the evolving business model. They maintain the business application components of the development repository. Most importantly, they guide solution developers in blending the business object model with the infrastructure services needed to implement the models in an e-Commerce platform.

Solution Developers are application developers. They develop the use cases for the specific application at hand, compose solutions through extensive use of business object models and use case repositories They assemble application components to implement e-Commerce applications. Unlike conventional programmers or programmer/analysts, they do not build or program components. Instead they assemble or glue together business solutions from prefabricated components. They use highly integrated development environments (IDEs) such as IBM's VisualAge, Symantech's Visual Café, Sybase's PowerJ and Inprise's Jbuilder. Emerging Computer Assisted Software Engineering (CASE) tools and related methods will likely appear that tighten the link between business modeling and software development. Tools for understanding and managing business processes, such as Intellicorp's LiveModel™, will likely evolve to the e-Commerce development space. Today, LiveModel™ allows solutions developers to build logical business models that can automate the configuration and management of the SAP/R3 ERP system. 

Solution developers likely come from the ranks of experienced object-oriented developers since the component paradigm is the next step beyond objects, not a replacement. Their knowledge and experience can be levered and built upon for component-based development. 

Component Developers build components. They are masters of component technology and know the intricacies of composition, delegation, and object-oriented systems analysis and design. They are proficient in component development languages (such as Java and C++), modeling standards (such as UML and XMI), and distributed computing platforms (such as CORBA, DCOM, and EJB). They understand and think in terms of architectural design patterns. 

As high quality business components and application frameworks become commercially available, component developers working directly in business enterprises will be fewer and fewer as they will likely work for software development companies. In the meantime they will close the gap between business requirements and available components. Component developers must be highly qualified software engineers since quality components do not just happen. They are carefully constructed using quality software engineering disciplines. Component developers, therefore, must be highly trained specialists and masters of software quality processes such as CMM and ISO as well as masters of component-based development methods. 

Human Factors engineers are needed to design the next generation of user interfaces. While the graphical user interface (GUI) is recognized as the enabler of wide-spread personal computing, task-centered user interfaces provide assistance to end-users and can be a boon to productivity in the world of e-Commerce. E-commerce transactions can involve a multitude of complex steps and processes. Well designed user interfaces can help navigate and guide the user through these tasks, keeping track of progress, and picking up where users leave off when transactions span multiple sessions of work. 

Human factors engineering has never been of such importance to applications development. In the race to engineer customer processes that delight, the differentiating factor among e-Commerce systems is helpfulness, not just the prettiness of the GUI. Researchers in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) are very active in researching and developing task-centered user interfaces. Whether through hiring experts or engaging them as consultants, winning e-Commerce development teams will have a human factors specialist at the planning table and at the development workbench. All participants in any e-Commerce development effort should read Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things before even thinking about designing customer-facing processes. 

The new business models of e-Commerce require new organizations. In today's interconnected economy, companies discover that they cannot innovate alone. James Moore explains that organizational form follows function. "The old multidivisional firm (the M-form) is giving way to the ecosystem form (E-form) where networks of complimentary functions are established to deliver end-to-end business processes to existing and potential markets." It is the degree of integration made possible by the Internet that allows this new business form. In the future, connections in the E-form will occur dynamically, on the fly. The value-grid will replace the value-chain in business-to-business ecosystems.

Transitioning a company to the E-form is certainly no short term proposition. Building and maintaining trading partner relationships is a lot of work requiring a lot of time, energy and insight. Even for the short term, where initial e-Commerce initiatives are launched to go after low-hanging fruit or in response to competitive pressure, new organizations are needed. As a new channel of business, the embarking on an e-Commerce path can be likened to starting a new business, whether from scratch or through merger or acquisition. As with any business endeavor, e-Commerce initiatives require human, financial and technology resources. In addition, it is reasonable to assume that the employees and organizations conducting today's business are fully occupied, if not overworked as a result of downsizing. Furthermore, e-Commerce initiatives introduce radical change in the ways work is done to a workforce already entrenched in the current ways of working and thinking. Changing the mental models of an established workforce is often costly and painful. As a result, it is not uncommon for corporations to spin off separate e-Commerce companies to gain agility and the benefits of green-field development - to wit, barnesandnoble.com, Inc., owned equally by "bricks-and-mortar" retailer Barnes & Noble and German media giant Bertelsmann. In both the short term and long, organizational design is a critical issue of e-Commerce strategy.