Processes Driving the Networked Economy

• Authors: Amit P. Sheth;Wil van der Aalst;Ismailcem B. Arpinar
• Venue: IEEE Concurrency
• Year: 1999

The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary electronic commerce (E-commerce) leading to a new networked economy. The emphasis has moved from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) between applications in different organizations to an entirely new way of IT management and new forms of information not bound by traditional organizational boundaries. The current focus is on using Internet for easier communication and access through exchanging data (with a better syntactic vehicle of XML), messages, individual business transactions, and Web-based application interfaces (sometimes termed as webicization). What is needed in the future is to share information that can be more easily understood by the trading partners without prior context, as well as to support processes crossing organizational borders. This will advance E-commerce from facilitating individual business transactions to support the management of the causal relations between organizational processes. To a large extent, today's workflow technology remains independent of collaboration and information systems, while critical information systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems increasingly add workflow capabilities as new features (see box "Does workflow technology have future?"). This article proposes that the evolution of information system architecture will be powered by an organic workflow process technology and outlines three likely stages of architectural evolution in the context of networked economy. It also reviews the state of the art of the key components of current workflow technology-design and modeling, analysis, enactment, interoperability, and adaptability-while discussing critical gaps in the current technology with respect to the future we envision, and suggesting potential research issues.