E-business applications: technologies for tomorrow's solutions
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BOOK REVIEW
E-business applications: technologies for tomorrow’s solutions J. Gasos and K-D Thoben (Eds.) Published by Springer-Verlag, London, UK, 2003, 266pp, ISBN 3-540-43663-4
Reviewed by: Marinos Themistoceleous Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK
European Journal of Information Systems (2003) 12, 323–324. doi:10.1057/palgrave. ejis.3000477
This book provides insights into a number of issues related to electronic commerce (EC) and e-business applications. Some of the issues that are analysed in this book are interesting and are attempting to approach the same phenomenon from two different dimensions: one, the old economy and two, the new e-business era. There are several strong points in this book. For example, approaches like that reported by Flederix in the ‘Dynamic Network Organisations: A New Paradigm that is Here to Stay’ are enlightening. According to Flederix, the new paradigm should incorporate systems that deal with Knowledge Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning. All these systems as well as a series of other applications such as legacy systems should function in an integrated way to allow organisations to gain competitive advantage and integrate their business processes. In addition, the last two sections cover important issues like supply chain management applications and extended and virtual enterprise applications. Most organisations face problems with their supply chain and the coordination of supply chain systems at intra- and inter-organisational level. Therefore, the issues covered in two sections are helpful for both companies and the research community. However, there would seem to be several shortcomings in this book. The first is that the title promises much more than it finally delivers. One of the most important issues in e-business applications is their integration with backend information systems and unfortunately the book does not cover or discuss such a topic. A chapter or two like the one entitled ‘Dynamic Forecasting for Master Production Planning with Stock and Capacity Constraints’ discusses the integration of e-business with backend applications, but the discussion is not in depth and does not cover the integration problems or technologies. The first section refers more to the trends of e-business applications rather than the state of the art applications and technologies, and so it does not report or analyse topics related to Customer Relationship Management, eGovernment or the role of state-of-the-art technologies that can be used for inter-organisational integration like Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) or Web Services. Both of these last two technologies can be used by organisations to develop flexible and maintainable IT infrastructures that incorporate functionality from
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disparate applications (e.g. ERP, legacy, e-business). This lack of depth of analysis can also be seen in other chapters, and some overlap of material, suc
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