Preface

With this book, Alan Kotok and David Webber have made an important contribution to the understanding of ebXML from both a managerial and technical perspective. ebXML holds great promise for helping to facilitate global e-business for small and large players alike. It may well be the solution the EC community has been seeking for some time.

Traditional EDI has worked well for more than 30 years . In particular, it has worked well for the large hub companies who often coerced their smaller suppliers (known as " spokes ") into using EDI if they wanted to keep the hubs as customers. For the hubs, EDI was faster, cheaper, and more accurate than exchanging paper business documents. It proved to be essential for supporting such supply chain partnerships as Just in Time manufacturing; Quick Response; and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment. As evidence of its value, some 95% of the Fortune 1000 companies in the U.S. use EDI. On the other hand, as evidence that small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) used it only because of the hubs' insistence, only about 2% of SMEs are traditional EDI users.Traditional EDI can be complicated to set up and administer, and, as practitioners well know, EDI standards are standard in name only.

For some time, the search has been on for a "new EDI," a method of exchanging standard business documents that would be simple and cheap enough that the benefits of EDI would be opened up to large and small companies alike, no matter where in the world they were located. The vision of the new solution was one in which the intelligence needed to interpret electronic business documents could be somehow encapsulated with the documents themselves . This would permit a company to create an electronic purchase order, for example, and send it over the Internet to a company it had never done business with before, and have that purchase order be interpreted and processed at the receiving end. Many schemes have been advanced. Alan and David review most of them in their book. Indeed, they were personally involved with some of the research efforts, as was our Center.

In 1999, for example, one of our graduate students, Ren Kasan, developed a prototype operating environment for XML/EDI under the aegis of the XML/edi Group. David was one of our external advisors on the project. Some elements of that work were carried forward to the ebXML Registry and Repository specifications.

As of this writing, there seems to be a consensus building around ebXML as being the most promising of the candidate solutions. The web site, ebXML.org, describes it as follows :

[A] set of specifications that together enable a modular electronic business framework. The vision of ebXML is to enable a global electronic marketplace where enterprises of any size and in any geographical location can meet and conduct business with each other through the exchange of XML based messages. ebXML is a joint initiative of the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) and OASIS, developed with global participation for global usage.

As with any emerging technology, practitioners need to ask themselves whether ebXML will become a viable option. They also need to determine whether now is the right time to make an investment in learning more about it, developing a pilot installation, and perhaps even becoming involved in the collective effort to help bring it into widespread usage. These are important questions, and this book provides answers.

ebXML could be exactly what the EC community has been waiting for. Alan and David explain it in very clear terms and position it for the reader in its proper historical and technical context. They give us a much-needed platform of understanding of the potential benefits that ebXML can bring to global e-business: a consistent pathway openly supported by the leading vendors in the field.

” Donald J. McCubbrey, Ph.D.

Director, Center for the Study of Electronic Commerce Daniels College of Business University of Denver Denver, Colorado, USA