Interoganizational system opportunities and challenges

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2005), "Interoganizational system opportunities and challenges", Internet Research, Vol. 15 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2005.17215eaa.001

Interoganizational system opportunities and challenges

Interoganizational system opportunities and challenges

Interorganizational systems (IOS) play an important and growing role in our computational landscape. IOS development necessitates different planning techniques, different cooperative relationships, and presents different technological challenges than classic internal information systems. Lee, Lin and Pai help introduce us to this topic in their study of the Influence of environmental and organizational factors on the success of internet-based interorganizational systems planning.

B2B systems focusing on supply relationships are probably the dominant form of IOS in operation today. Power explores Strategy Development Processes as Determinants of B2B e-Commerce Performance: A Comparative Model in a Supply Chain Management Context. This study highlights the difference between different industries and shows how B2B strategy development differs. One of many findings in this paper is how the strategy development process in manufacturing companies has a different impact on B2B technology investment than similar strategies in the wholesale/retail group.

Lopez,Oppliger, And Pernul discusss Why Have Public Key Infrastructures Failed So Far. Given that public key cryptography is such a crucial driver of e-commerce and an enabler of IOS implementation, one would expect smoother integration and higher levels of adoption than currently exists. After providing a clear description of PKI constructs and usage, the authors analyze the technical, economic, legal, and social reasons the failure as they see it. After identifying the major shortcomings, they provide some practical pointers on how the difficulties can be overcome.

The International Networking Conference (INC) is always a good source of interesting research and internet research is pleased to be able to bring you three top papers from the 2005 conference. Coetzee and Eloff present a new approach to Automonous Trust for Web Services. They show that by collecting and analyzing a web services XML environment it is possible to establish evidence of trust over time. Trust is established and monitored autonomously be each web service as it analyzes the ongoing nature of its relationships with other web services. Gymnopoulos et al. present A Generic Grid Security Policy Reconciliation Framework. The approach taken here is to allow grid participants to negotiate their security policies with other grid entities. Such negotiation, it is show, can be facilitated by common security policy semantics and a mechanism for policy reconciliation to deal with conflicts.

In Issues in Moving from Web Services to Service Orientation, Phippen, Taylor and Allen show that implementing an effective Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) involves more than just cobbling together a set of web services. By focusing on the development process and procedures for implementing SOA, their work helps identify a number of pitfalls that could be avoided. Many thanks to Steve Furnell and Paul Dowland for organizing INC and helping select these outstanding papers.

David G. Schwartz