Enabling integrated decision making for electronic commerce by modelling an enterprise’s sharable knowledge

A key benefit of advances in information technology has been the increased ability to make decisions that integrate different perspectives. Enterprise resource planning software integrates information from traditionally disparate parts of the same organization. Search engines and Internet services allow a user to integrate information from sources all over the world. So what kind of integrated decisions can the e‐commerce supplier or customer make? From a technological perspective, the answer to this question depends on the following: how a given organization presents its information to others, and how it finds the right information from others. A useful tool for e‐commerce suppliers and customers to make integrated decisions is an enterprise model, a computational model of the knowledge about an enterprise – its products, processes, organizational structures, resources, goals, and constraints. Sharable knowledge, once organized and represented in an enterprise model, can then be integrated by the modelled enterprise’s e‐commerce partners. Presents background on enterprise modelling followed by the key managerial and technological challenges in extending traditional models of the enterprise for e‐commerce. Finally, discusses research to address some of these challenges.