Bob Roberts

IT supporting supplier relationships: The role of electronic commerce

Abstract The paper discusses how electronic commerce may be used to support a portfolio of supplier relationships and considers a case study based on BT Supply Management (SM) who have developed a supplier relationship framework to categorise suppliers and select appropriate procurement strategies. Electronic Commerce applications may be mapped to the framework to support different types of supplier relationships. The case study also examines the opportunities of utilising the Internet to support procurement-related processes. The impact of electronic commerce on the supply chain is considered in terms of customer service, lower costs, more efficient processes and improved supplier relationships.

Strategies in the broadband cable TV industry: the challenges for management and technology innovation

Purpose – To examine the status and strategies of the broadband cable TV industry on a world‐wide basis.Design/methodology/approach – Data were gathered through a review of the literature and a series of one‐on‐one interviews with key industry executives, and with consultant analysts dedicated to the industry. The SWOT technique proved useful in analyzing the organizational environment; value chain analysis was used to understand the value‐generating components of the core activities; a Boston Consulting Group product portfolio matrix identified the nature of the products offered by the industry.Findings – Four forces were identified which had impacted significantly on the industry. These were the rise of the internet, the experience of competition for telephony services, the arrival of satellite TV, and a persistent image of poor customer service. The paper observes that recent trading results have revealed very little evidence that modified strategies are making a significant improvement in the industry...

Aspects of trusted and secure business-oriented VO management in service oriented architectures

Virtual enterprises or organisations (VO) have been the focus of research for over a decade. Although proprietary implementations of VO management tools exist, secure tools based on interoperating open standards are not yet available. The open standards on which to build them are just being released as reliable implementations. The requirements of VOs for trust and security are presented, which lead to an architecture for a secure VO management framework. The design of such a framework is analysed to show how the current open Web service specifications could be used to implement it in practice. The need for the reliable and interoperable implementation of these essential Web services specifications is advocated.

Request Based Virtual Organisations (RBVO): An Implementation Scenario

Evolving e-commerce technologies increasingly enable organisations to participate in different types of network forms or in electronic markets with previously unidentified trading partners. Virtual organisations (VO) take different forms, have varying lifecycles and involve different scope and depth of relationships. This paper examines the literature in terms of the terminology of virtual organisations, the business drivers, the common theoretical concepts and models as well as the enabling technologies. A specific form of VO, Request Based Virtual Organisation (RBVO), is then considered in relation to these VO variants, particularly as realised through the practical work done within the framework of the EU sponsored LAURA project that facilitates interregional zones of adaptive electronic commerce.

Virtual Organization Management Using Web Service Choreography And Software Agents

The purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach for the automated management of Virtual Organizations using Web Service Choreography and Software Agents. Web Service Choreography is important for the support and management of commonly agreed collaboration scenarios. In order for the scenarios to be understood and accepted by members of a VO, the scenarios need to be specified in a standard, machine-readable form and mapped to the implementation mechanisms of the VO participants. Software agents can then serve as the background support mechanism for the automation and management of the phases of identification, formation, operation and termination of a VO.

Public Services: eGovernance and eHealth - What are we really talking about? 'A Cure All for all Ills?'

Patient or citizen centred healthcare is about access, choice, communication and service provision. It implies that one of the prime functions of e-healthcare is to deliver a range of effective and efficient information services based on specific needs of different user groups such as health institutions, health professionals and citizens. This paper offers some reflections from the perspectives of communication and political theory on a project that looked at local people’s need for health information and recommended strategies for change. It is argued that, in the light of major new technological and other developments in the provision of health information, perspectives from other disciplines allow for improved solutions to be established.

A framework for situation room analysis and exploration of its application potential in the information technologies market

Work presented in this paper forms part of a wider research in defining a methodological framework for situation room analysis (SRA), and its employment for complex (business enterprise) systems study. More specifically, we investigate the area of multiparty collaboration and decision‐making activities by using the central metaphor of a situation room (SR). The latter term is broadly used in the context of military operations and has specific semantical connotations. These connotations are deliberately exploited in order to propose an analytical scheme based on it, which aims to assist planning initiatives and decision making in a particular application domain. Historically speaking, a SR is considered as the intelligence analysis centre used to stay abreast of the latest intelligence reports and updates. For the purposes of our aim, i.e. the multiparty collaboration and decision‐making activities from within the SRA framework, it is easy to see that the latter should be data‐driven.

Use of the Situation Room metaphor to support modelling of investments in energy decision-making

We describe a methodology for modelling interactions and guiding behaviours of actors and stakeholders in the energy territory using the concept of the Situation Room. Such an approach enables a new way to model interactions of a rather idiosyncratic nature, in this instance a closed ? and despite its liberalisation still strongly affected under the shadow of national governments and the central Euroland (European Commission) ? market that is concerned with the exchange and valuation of energy both as a tangible good accounted as a production factor, as well as an intangible good related with many different growth and sustainability parameters.

Towards a Culture Of Sharing And Exchange:Investing in the Intangible Assets And Intellectual Capital For The Leveraging Of Collaborative Networks

An important challenge in establishing lasting changes of culture and values in an organisation involves ensuring that organized learning processes are anchored within the organisation. Our experience from several projects shows that good intentions are not sufficient for ensuring the operation of a CN, Many of the existing patterns reflect an earlier situation when research was not as strictly monitored for its short-term results and its financial (contributions to) outcomes. The central point of the paper is that collaborative networks (CN) do not need to ‘live with’ and experience all the deficiencies faced in regard to the introduction of virtual forms of organisation in the corporate world, as these have been introduced in several national or application contexts in Europe.

Towards the architecture of managed dynamic virtual organisations for e-business communities

This paper explores the challenges of constructing a distributed e-business architecture based on the concept of the Dynamic (Request-Based) Virtual Organisation (RBVO), a B2B value network which is dynamically formed upon demand to meet identified business opportunities. In this paper, we investigate the steps involved in achieving inter-domain end-to-end business collaboration using the structural concepts of the RBVO by presenting a reference architecture and a framework (realisation of that architecture in a particular class of environments). The practical work was done within the framework of EU-sponsored research projects (LAURA, TrustCoM). The LAURA project, which aims to facilitate creation of interregional e-business zones for SMEs uses, where applicable, the potential of the ebXML architecture to support the innovative RBVO concept. The TrustCoM project concentrates on application of Web Services technologies for secure, trusted and manageable business interactions and VO management based on the choreographed collaboration concept.