Internet technology and vast use of computers have provided impetus to business ideas, which earlier were not considered to be practical at large scales. Remote systems considered to be inaccessible are becoming fast accessible. Businesses are moving away from the traditional brick and mortar business models and moving to the Internet to reach a wider customer base. The concept of doing business over the web, termed as eBusiness, has given rise to new challenges both with the data and technology.

Interestingly, Internet growth has followed the growth of data warehousing and has increased the demand for the management of very large, terabyte-sized, databases. While just a few years ago terabyte databases were the extraordinarily large exceptions, they are fast becoming the norm. This growth in data demands an increase in improved IT infrastructures, management capabilities and data strategies. Organizations are seeking more complete offerings from vendors in the hopes of reducing implementation times and costs and leveraging their business. Things that used to take years or months have to be accomplished in weeks or days.

The requirements for a successfully integrated Data Management – eBusiness architecture will involve a sound and robust Internet business model. It will also require a sophisticated technology strategy to match the business model performance, scalability, flexibility and ease of use. This flexible eBusiness Data Management Framework provides the kind of information that our practitioners should be aware of in order to recommend this architecture.

Project Scope and Objectives

The project charter is to implement DM architecture for our eBusiness solutions that will provide a framework to guide our consideration of eBusiness opportunities. The framework will allow us to leverage our skills to deliver solutions to our clients.

The scope of the framework includes three primary objectives:

1. Present a common understanding of DM architecture for our eBusiness solutions so that the firm’s practitioners can recognize client offerings;

2. Introduce the industry structure and standards that will impact the strategies of competitors and leading technology providers; an

3. Present an eBusiness strategic framework to guide our practitioner’s consideration or questions and related tools and techniques.

Each section of this document can be examined independently and will be updated as facts and circumstances change in the marketplace.

Key Success Factors

The success of the initiative will be driven, in large part, based on our ability to empower our clients to strengthen their customer relationships, deliver new services, and create new sources of value while at the same time generating more sales, higher profitability, and strengthening long-term customer loyalty.

The right architecture means that the organization will be able to support the tens of thousands of new users. Speed is every bit as important in scaling and maintaining Internet applications as it is in developing them. Having the right Computing Architecture makes these tasks considerably easier.

The framework must be easy to implement, maintain and change, and must also leverage from existing client systems. It must allow enterprises to manage workflow, no matter what systems people are working on or where the needed data reside. The framework should be compatible with applications from a wide array of manufacturers — and, of course, it needs to be up and operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The framework must be the central interface for managing customer interactions across multiple channels such as voice, the Web and e-mail. Additionally, it must have an open architecture so IT professionals have the flexibility to plug in different components, depending on their needs, and to change certain components rapidly over time.

Because not every business is the same, the framework must include applications that address the specific needs of the organization using it. These include applications for order processing, financial services, account management, billing, service provisioning, workflow management and fault management. No matter what the need, the system must be able to integrate a new application or retrofit an old one.

Business Models

Two of the traditional business models used in eBusiness are business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). Although the terms B2C and B2B are now being used more than ever before, the business concept has not changed. In the B2C model, the business sell merchandise to retail customers while in the B2B model businesses sell merchandise to other businesses. The major change in the eBusiness paradigm is that orders can be placed or matched over the Internet cutting down on costs and processing times. Direct one-to-one marketing can be facilitated at minimal cost over the Internet.

The B2C and B2B space has given rise to another business area – customer service. Businesses have realized that the industry focus should shift from Products to Customers. Instead of devising strategies to sell products (already being manufactured) to the customers, the focus now is to determine and develop the products that customers or the market is interested in buying. Customer relationship management (CRM) addresses the customer needs and concerns, and automates the responses to voice or email messages.

One leader in B2C retail business is Amazon.com, which specializes in selling merchandise over the web to individual customers. Their website has a virtual mall with links to other retailers. A customer surfs through the web site to find the product that he or she is interested in buying, adds it to the shopping cart, selects a shipping method and pays for the merchandise and shipping using a credit card. Order placement over the web, generally, does not require the involvement of a customer service representative or maintenance of large shopping stores leading to a significant reduction in costs. Amazon.com has a large warehouse where the merchandise is stored whereas another competing retailer, buy.com, procures merchandise once an order is received. Buy.com, therefore, has reduced warehouse maintenance costs. In the B2C space, there are vendors that specialize in given product categories, for example, etoys.com in toys and merchandise related to kids, pets.com in selling pets related merchandise, garden.com in selling gardening products etc.

On-line auction sites like ebay.com have a slightly different business model. eBay hosts a web site where registered users can sell merchandise to the highest bidder. eBay, in turn, charges a small fees for its service. Internet stock trading is another example with a model similar to that of an auction site. An on-line investor can purchase or sell equities, mutual funds, and bonds over the internet. A trade order is placed with an internet broker who passes it on to market maker and specialists. If the price on the limit order matches the bid (for a sale) or ask (for a purchase), the order is executed. The market maker then sends a report back to the internet broker updating the status of the order. The internet broker charges a fees for the executed trade and the interest on the amount borrowed if the trade was placed on margin. The entire process is automated with minimal human intervention except at the point where the trade is actually executed.

B2B scenario is not very different from a B2C one except that in the former businesses themselves are customers. It is now possible for businesses located in a remote part of the world to place and receive large orders from other businesses. In this case Internet technology facilitates the matching of right buyers and sellers cutting down the expenses on finding the right match. There are businesses that act as a B2B platform.

Some of the leading vendors that specialize in B2B software are Ariba, Tradex, and Interworld. The Ariba eCommerce platform integrates the internal and external commerce processes of buyers, suppliers, Net market makers, and value-added service providers, delivering a global eCommerce infrastructure that provides cost saving, revenue opportunities, and increased competitive advantage for businesses of all sizes. While Ariba is a leading solution provider for business-to-business applications, FreeMarkets creates business-to-business online auctions for buyers of industrial parts, raw materials, commodities and services. In other words, FreeMarkets model is analogous to that of eBay. Some other examples in the B2B space consist of Healtheon/WebMd that connects physicians to consumers, Chemdex provides solution for the world’s largest on-line market place of lab supplies, and Emerge creates a market place for the cattle industry.

In the customer relationship management space, vendors like Kana Communications, Quintus Corp., Chordiant, Silknet etc provide eCRM solutions. Traditional CRM solutions are provided by Siebel, Oracle etc. to name a few. A CRM application does not necessarily denote an eBusiness model but provides a solution for managing customers over the web with significant reduction in costs. The eBusiness framework proposes to explore various business models within the B2C, B2B, and eCRM space, and provide detailed descriptions of each.

Data Challenges

The important question that arises is what are the major challenges to implement an eBusiness solution. A very high level perspective may give the impression that an eBusiness solution is not very different from the traditional client/server technology. This is true to some extent. The concept of B2C and B2B is not new. The fact that organizations are harnessing the power of Internet has given a new perspective to the business models. Some of the new challenges facing these organizations are:

§ Volume of data – The volume of data to be collected will increase by several orders of magnitude. Web related data like cookies, user IP address, and web pages surfed are now recorded in addition to traditional order related data.

§ Sources of data – New sources of data will be added. The nature of data (data type) will also change. New sources such as web server logs, email messages, voice messages etc will be added to the existing repository of order numbers, item Ids, quantity, sale amount etc.

§ New business ideas using old techniques – There is not much change in the technology itself in the sense that components of the client server technology such as the RDBMS technology, ODBC, front end applications will still be used.

§ Bandwidth and network connectivity – Internet has allowed people to access the web and place orders from almost all over the world. This generates the need for faster connections, devoted networks (such as T1 lines), faster routers, server load balancing, and replication.

§ Security – Internet sites are quite vulnerable to hacker attacks and can pose a serious threat to the security of the transactions and personal information exchanged over the Internet.

§ Privacy – There will be privacy issues with information stored on the host web sites pertaining to customers’ name, address, purchasing habits to name a few.

In addition, there are literally tens of independent vendors all offering “best of breed” eBusiness tools and solutions. One of the challenges is sorting through the technical complexities as well as the marketing messages of each of the vendors and determining the set of tools that offers the most flexible and comprehensive solutions for your business.

The eBusiness framework proposes to associate data challenges with different business models.

High Level Components and Technical Feature Set

In this booming economy new business ideas are emerging at a rapid pace. In order to materialize these ideas significant progress is being made in technology. New software solutions are being developed which make full use of the traditional database and Internet technology. Figure 1 presents a layout of the different technologies and their integration to form a solution at a corporate level. The figure shows how eBusiness technology is tied with business intelligence, the latter being used for data analysis. The figure is self-explanatory and detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this article.

Figure 1: A graphical layout of different components of IT infrastructure at a corporate level.

A list of components constituting the IT infrastructure is presented below:

§ User Interface

§ Web Server

§ Firewall and Network

§ Back End application – OLTP

§ Intermediate layer for seamless integration

§ Transform old OLTP systems to e-business applications

§ Relational Database

§ Storage Medium

§ Information Portals

§ Different components of eCRM

§ Automated email response

§ Remote on-line conferences

Others – traditional systems and applications

§ Business Intelligence

§ Applications

§ HR

§ Financials

§ Advanced Supply Change Management

§ Order management, tax, pricing, shipping

§ Datawarehouse / ODS

§ Multi-dimensional database

§ Pre-defined reports or briefings

§ OLAP tool

§ Data Mining

The components described above are generally coded using Visual basic, C++, C, Java, HTML and XML languages to name a few. CORBA technology is used to combine disparate systems. Most of the applications handling large volumes of data deploy relational database technology. Multidimensional database technology is commonly used for online analytical processing (OLAP).

Deploying an eBusiness solution requires an internet browser and a back-end Web server. The applications and the incoming data may be hosted by internet service providers (ISPs). Services of companies that specialize in data maintenance on their own server may also be deployed. This approach reduces the hardware and maintenance costs for the eBusiness companies. In order to be able to direct the data and balance the server load, fast routers and network lines are necessary.

Key Vendors

The table shown below presents a list of components used in implementing an eBusiness application and integrating it with business intelligence tools.

Component	Vendor	Product	VendorWeb Site Link
Web Servers
	Microsoft	IIS
	IBM	Lotus Domino WebSphere Application Server
	AOL	Netscape	http://www.netscape.com/appserver/v2.1/datasheet/index.html
	Oracle	Oracle Web Server	http://www.oracle.com/asd/oas/oas.html
	Apache	Apache
Firewall
	Checkpoint Software Technologies Ltd	Firewall-1

Email Routing and Auto Response
	Genesys Software	Genesys -Email
	Kana Communications	Kana 5 Suite
	Mustang Software	Mustang Message Center Mustang Network Mustang ListCaster Mustang FileCenter
	e-Gain Communications	EGaing Commerce 2000: Mail, Live, Campaign, Inform, Voice
	General Interactive
	Aptex Software	SelectResponse
Remote Conferencing
	eFusion Inc	eBridge
	Quintus	EContact Suite
	Sitebridge
	Cisco - Webline Communications Corporation
	Balisoft	LiveContact, E-mailContact, WebAdvisor
Data Mining
	Oracle	Darwin	http://www.oracle.com/datawarehouse/products/datamining/
	IBM	Intelligent Data and Text Miner	http://www-4.ibm.com/software/data/iminer/
Commerce Server
	IBM	Net.Commerce	http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/commerce/servers/
		Microsoft Site Server
Business Intelligence
	Oracle	Oracle Business Intelligence Solution (OBIS)	http://www.oracle.com/tools/InternetBITools/
	SAP	SAP Business Intelligence	http://www.sap.com/solutions/bi/index.htm
	PeopleSoft	Peoplsoft 8: Business Intelligence	http://www.peoplesoft.com/en/products_solutions/current/r8_intelligence_en.html
RDBMS
	Oracle	Oracle 8I	http://www.oracle.com/database/prodfam/index.html?/database/prodfam/enterprise.html
	Microsoft	SQLServer
	IBM	DB2	http://www-4.ibm.com/software/data/db2/
	Informix	Dynamic Server, Extended Parallel Server, Red Brick Decision Server	http://www.informix.com/informix/products/servers/
MultiDimensional Database
	Oracle	Express	http://www.oracle.com/olap/
	Hyperion	Essbase	http://www.hyperion.com/essbaseolap.cfm
ROLAP
	Oracle	Discoverer	http://www.oracle.com/tools/discoverer/
	MicroStrategy	DSS Agent	http://www.microstrategy.com/
	Business Objects	Business Objects	http://www.businessobjects.com/
	DataSage	DataSage	http://www.datasage.com/
MOLAP
	Oracle	Sales Analyzer Financial Anal. Express Objects	http://www.oracle.com/olap/
		Halos
Server Hosting
	Exodus	Not applicable	http://www.exodus.com/
	Globix	Not applicable	http://www.globix.com/
B2B eCommerce
	Ariba	Ariba ORMS, ORMX, Network, Internet Business Exchage Service, Ariba market Suite	http://www.ariba.com/corp/AribaSolutions/overview.asp
	Tradex	Commerce Center	http://www.tradex.com/
	Interworld	Commerce Exchange
Content Provider
	InfoSpace		http://rtq.infospace.com

The eBusiness framework proposes to provide detailed descriptions of the components of eBusiness.

Detailed description of two of the components, Web Intelligence Tools and Information Portals that can be used to analyze the data collected by eBusiness application are provided in Appendix A.

Development Life Cycle and Deliverables

A typical software development lifecycle can be divided into five phases, viz., analysis, design, development, testing, and packaging and rollout. Figure 2 shows the layout and integration of different phases as applied to developing a Corporate Information Factory. Business, IT, and software requirements are gathered during the analysis phase. Joint application design sessions and personal interviews are conducted to gather this information. Based on the collected requirements, technical architecture of the software or the application is prepared. The next step consists of writing the code in a selected scripting language like C++, Java, PL/SQL etc. The project may not require the development of software but the implementation of a packaged solution, which may still require some custom development work. After the development phase, a prototype is ready which requires stress testing. A testing plan that was developed in the design phase is now forced into action, and the robustness of the application is tested. Assuming the successful completion of the project, the developed software is packaged and rolled out onto the production machine, or distributed to the client.

Figure 2: Pictorial layout of the components of software development cycle.

The progress made during the project is documented using a set of templates. These templates are a part of the software methodology may it be a data warehousing or an eBusiness methodology. Some of the important templates by project phase are listed below:

Analysis

§ Business requirements document – information collected from joint application design sessions

§ MIS requirements – information on technical infrastructure

Design and Development

§ Initial technical architecture

§ Detailed business architecture

§ Logical design – entity relationship diagram, hierarchies

§ Physical database design – database layout in terms of segments, extents etc.

§ Capacity Analysis – hardware requirements based on number of concurrent connections, peak usage

§ Security Analysis – security at the application and database level, firewalls

§ Risk analysis

§ ETL design

§ Front-end design

§ Software selection

Testing

§ Stress Test Plan

§ Stress Test Results

Rollout

§ Training plan – train the administrators and end users

§ Rollout plan

§ Key deliverables – end product, documents, training

In addition to these templates, there may be project management specific templates like project proposal document, weekly progress reports, project planning document, and budget tracking documents. The eBusiness framework proposes to either develop a pre-defined set of templates or modify the templates of a licensed methodology.

Key Business Questions

Business and technical requirements are identified during the analysis phase before the design of the eBusiness application can be developed. Some of the questions that can be asked during the Joint Application Design sessions and personal interviews are given below.

§ Who are your buyers?

§ Who are your vendors?

§ Who are your new competitors?

§ What is your existing competition?

§ Are there any new product substitutes?

§ Why do you want to build an eBusiness application – competitive edge, cut down the expenses, how and where does it fit in the long-term strategy of your corporation?

§ What is the business model – logical or conceptual model?

§ What is the resident expertise in the company – in terms of software and hardware?

§ What is your technical infrastructure?

§ Do you want to host the application or outsource it to the ISPs?

§ Do you want to purchase the hardware or outsource it?

§ How do you manage inventory control?

§ Is there a call center in place?

§ What is the error tolerance for your applications?

§ What applications are currently in place?

§ Do you want to replace the existing OLTP applications or transform them into eBusiness applications?

§ What are the purchasing patterns and are there any seasonal patterns?

§ What kind of order fulfillment system is in place?

§ Do you accept international credit cards and payments?

§ How many hits are you accepting per day?

§ What fraction of customers will operate in the thin client mode? How scalable should the solution be?

§ Will there be data exchange with your clients? What kind of systems do your clients have in place?

§ How much do you want custom developed code versus out of the box solution?

§ Who is the preferred shipping vendor?

Business Question Evaluation Guideline

§ Drive the vendor selection by ensuring the client has a strategy in place. The client should decide where it wants to be, and why, and what the future would look like. That will drive what the enterprise needs to get there, which in turn, will drive vendor selection.

§ Determine the systems needed to meet the enterprise’s vision. Determine the customer contact points that require automation, determine where the data will reside, and figure out how data will move from one point to another.

§ Thoroughly evaluate the vendor’s solutions, not its buzzwords. When the enterprise knows what it wants to do, it will be able to generate a list of vendors that can help solve the problem — and it will have plotted a clear thought process with which to compare the vendor’s vision.

Deliverables

The eBusiness framework proposes to deliver the following five deliverables:

1. A white paper on software development lifecycle.

2. A white paper on different business models.

3. A methodology consisting of a set of templates in line with the RAD framework and the A3 methodology.

4. Demos of different components of the IT infrastructure.

Having briefly discussed the project scope and objectives, business models, data challenges, vendors by components, software development lifecycle, key business questions, and the deliverables, our next step is to define the budgetary and resource requirements for the project.

Project Schedule and Resource Investment

Assumptions

§ Support from AT Leadership Team/commitment from the three CoE Sponsoring Partners

§ Initial target is theoretical only

§ Funding through pooling/allocation of budgets

§ Working prototype will be piloted by one or more project teams across the AT community

§ The feature set described above will be prioritized and delivered incrementally

§ Integration skills and tools will need to be continually monitored to implement integrated eBusiness, supply chain management, customer business solutions.

Risks

§ Availability of the required skillsets/resources/budget

§ Vendor hype may overshadow our ability to align ourselves with products that may provide our clients the maximum benefits.

§ Inability to provide solutions that address performance issues and site failure may negatively impact our clients’ business as well as site revisits.

§ Solutions with highly structured production environments with multiple tiers, several geographic locations, and dozens of servers can stifle innovation. This type of environment will also uncover staffing issues as firms struggle to find -- and pay for -- the highly skilled and expensive people who can build and maintain these sites.

§ Given the speed of change in EC, remaining competitive will require Business Consulting to continuously develop and update this framework

Appendix A

Web Intelligence Tools

Issues

Business goal achievement can no longer be measured by simplistic measures. Rudimentary metrics such as use of hits and page views to judge site can't reveal whether sites achieve objectives like brand loyalty or customer support savings.

Scattered data sources impede a unified view of the customer. Users traverse HTML pages, email applications, shopping carts, and chat rooms during site visits, leaving tracks across unconnected silos of data . Instead of meshing these silos, most companies evaluate them independently using a variety of reporting tools. The results are fragmented glimpses of user activity and timeless efforts spent digging through historical Web server data for business insight. These efforts usually require overnight batch-processing jobs and typically produce encyclopedia-length packages of generic reports.

Benefits

Cataloging of the metrics below, may help drive a measurement strategy and allow clients to drive personalization, commerce, and marketing automation efforts.

Metric	Data Requirement	Benefit
Customer identity information	Visitors' demographic profiles, behavior characteristics, and personal interests	To help site designers and marketing managers optimize the appeal of content and ads. Distinct elements like names and e-mail addresses will be used to analyze repeat visitors and the actions they took.
Customer purchases	Linking of any action, including software and document downloads, promotional sign-ups, and e-mail queries to site traffic	To assess the effectiveness of content
System response	Real-time system throughput data to determine whether servers or file deliveries keep up with demand	To ensure that potential sales aren't lost because order forms appear too slowly and the shopper moves on
Visitor traffic patterns	Detailed coverage of visitor requests, points of origin, and navigation paths	To support design decisions and provide the underlying traffic context for all performance measures
Customer Service	User feedback on current services and applications	To provide customers with a medium to help better serve their needs

· Process Application Server provides an optimal environment for loading, controlling and executing business processes through Commerce Exchange. By separating databases, Web servers, business objects and presentation layers, the Process Application Server provides a higher, more scalable level of componentization, as well as, facilitating real-time information exchange between legacy applications and systems located throughout the enterprise.

Key Vendors

Vendor Name / Vendor Product	Web Site Link
Interworld / Commerce Exchange

· Web Broker is a software application that provides dynamic load balancing and intelligent load distribution of commerce requests across multiple servers, complete with automated failover capabilities enabling maximum support for peak purchasing periods with no downtime and no loss of data.

Key Vendors

Vendor Name / Vendor Product	Web Site Link
Interworld / Commerce Exchange

· Business Adapters allow seamless integration of business functions within Commerce Exchange by linking with internal and external enterprise systems, such as ERP, supply chain management, customer asset management, payment processing and EDI.

Key Vendors

Vendor Name / Vendor Product	Web Site Link
Interworld / Commerce Exchange

Information Portal

Definition

A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping, news services, message boards, reference tools, and scads more. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

Examples

America Online (AOL) has a web site or service that offers visitors the ability to retrieve their mail from the Web site. Visitors to the site can also download software for exchanging instant messages with users on the "closed" AOL system. Visitors can also receive free personalized news.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. DB2 is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation.