Planning and building global electronic commerce networks

Electronic Commerce (EC) - the electronification of the customer-supplier value chain as well as horizontal industry value chains - is fundamentally changing the business landscape by enabling new product, service, and information distribution and sales channels. This paper discusses techniques for planning and designing networks to support an organization's business goals and allow it to perform EC. The process starts with gaining an understanding of the organization's business goals and processes and how they are supported or enabled by networking technology and goes through several steps resulting in the detailed EC network design. The correctness of the design can be verified both by mapping its features back to the original business drivers and-verifying that it does, indeed, support those drivers in practice. Companies that follow such a process and plan their global enterprise networks to meet the realities of the emerging EC paradigm will be best positioned to meet the future demands of their customers.