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Airports have never been good places for sleepwalking. If not for the ubiquitous ID checks, who knows where sleepwalkers might end up: Auckland instead of Oakland, Orly instead of Orlando. However, amid the hustling, crisscrossing travelers juggling cell phones, suitcases, and small children, there is a place where a brief sleepwalk is safe: The moving walkway. Aye, perchance to dream: gliding slowly, you can drop everything, dream anything, and watch the world go by.
Nutty to brilliant to psychologically suspect, all sorts of strange ideas can flow through one’s head on the moving walkway. Denver International Airport, that all-too-familiar touchstone of travelers headed elsewhere, has especially long and wide versions. Perhaps it was on one of these horizontal escalators that someone dreamed up the notion of “collaborative commerce.” What a compelling, almost beautiful idea: hands joined across supply chains in a concerted effort to please customers, shareholders, and international standards bodies. As with normal commerce, the goal would be to create wealth, although this new animal would require us to redefine how we identify the ownership and discrete value of that wealth. In exchange for throwing aside a few old-world notions about private property, businesses, partners, and customers would enjoy a more deeply integrated process that delivers realtime satisfaction and stability.
Unfortunately, airport daydreams meet an abrupt end when that automated voice warns: “Caution! The moving walkway is about to end.” Then we have to go back to lugging our bags, avoiding collisions with other travelers, and figuring out where in the heck we’re going. Will collaborative commerce dreams meet a similarly blunt interruption, with the vision to become lost amongst a phalanx of old-world interests? Collaborative commerce, which Bruce Bond, GartnerGroup’s vice president and research area director states “will replace static, Web-enabled supply chain/value chain applications as the dominant application model by 2004,” must first run a gauntlet of privacy, property, labor, and legal concerns. New economy wags might poke fun at such Industrial Age concerns, but the powers that be have no intention of stepping back quietly.
Of course, the real question might be: How will traditional commercial interests, just now beginning to master click and mortar e-commerce, respond to a phenomenon that may be already well underway? In other words, dreamers of an orderly, collaborative, standards-based world had better wake up to the Napster economy.
The controversy surrounding Napster’s MP3 music distribution service is an object lesson in what happens when earlier notions of intellectual property meet the stateless world of the Internet—a lesson that has owners and creators of media content, proprietary business processes, and other rich data resources scared silly. The collaborative commerce architecture may not be a simple matter of regulated, thin-client access to well-guarded, centralized servers managed by professional service providers. Order will have to cohabit with disorder: that is, a loosely configured network of thousands of PC servers that use the power of directories to exchange content.
Collaborative Necessity
All of the major market research firms have been in hot competition to define the cybermarket frontier, or what will come after e-commerce as we’ve known it. GartnerGroup coined the term “collaborative commerce” (c-commerce), which I discussed in the context of SAP’s mySAP.com and i2 Technologies’ TradeMatrix.com a few columns back. According to GartnerGroup’s Bond, c-commerce is the result of two developments: “(1) The range of business participants (i.e., the connection paradigm) is expanding from those within an enterprise and its traditional trading partners to include the ‘cybermarket,’ enterprises in the trading community. (2) The enterprise’s focus (i.e., its ‘business paradigm’) is progressing from departmental productivity and external transaction handling to collaborative interaction.” The technology driving c-commerce includes component frameworks, integration middleware, supply chain and enterprise resource planning applications, and the Internet.
GartnerGroup predicts that by 2002, we will see more than 3,000 business-to-business (B2B) exchanges, some of which will certainly use SAP’s and i2’s Web marketplace infrastructures. To the consternation of B2B infomediaries such as VerticalNet, it appears that most of these buy-sell-trade auction exchanges will be developed and owned by industry players themselves, such as Ford Motor Co. or Boeing. But in any case, exchanges are only part of the c-commerce picture; other key elements will be collaborative product development, global contract manufacturing, and increasingly pervasive customer relationship management (CRM).
In April, GartnerGroup held an excellent conference focused on the impact of c-commerce on manufacturing, distribution, and supply chains (Chicago, April 25-27). However, after talking to various attendees, it was clear to me that while interest was high, so was the level of caution: How will patents be protected? Do I really want my organization’s DNA—its core business processes—exposed in a c-commerce “glass pipe- line,” as GartnerGroup’s Karen Peterson put it? Aren’t exchanges and auctions more suited to commodity products—not for finely crafted precision instruments and other goods and materials where quality is everything? Besides, my company requires assured, trusted supply chains to operate effectively, not here today, gone tomorrow spot markets.
GartnerGroup’s speakers often echoed the attendees’ caution, even as they painted a compelling vision of the c-commerce future. In fact, several noted that we are talking about a future that is already here: Many global manufacturing concerns already must function in a diffuse, open market in which the true wealth-generating assets—people, software, capital—are quite mobile. E-commerce has made nearly all participants in the new economy obsessed with time-to-market: Global enterprises, by definition 2437 operations, face time-to-market pressures that are literally constant. Thus, in many industries, manufacturers are being driven by economic realities to collaborate with partners and overcome legal and standards difficulties quickly. Partners share the pain: But they also share the benefits.
Integration middleware, according to Ross Altman, a GartnerGroup research director, must rise to the challenge of managing both the collaborative interplay of business processes and their protection. With XML as the “vocabulary,” message-based, hub-and-spoke architectures of modern solutions from Vitria, Active Software, NEON, and others should enable companies to do process and data transformation in fewer steps—ideally, just one—with the semantic integration occurring inside the middleware hub. The hubs will connect the workflow dots, so to speak, across c-commerce partner and supply chains. The hubs will be critical to ensure that security considerations are met—something that is much more difficult with solutions that simply move data around using HTTP.
CRM Everywhere
Although few companies will talk about exactly what they’re doing with it, we know that clickstream data is filling up terabytes of storage devices around the world. But in a c-commerce scenario, how will organizations know they are collecting meaningful data? C-commerce will only make the view of the customer even more incomplete and incoherent. External data will become critical to filling in the gaps. And with all c-commerce partners sharing a common desire to understand their customers—in real time, preferably—we will see new avenues of data collaboration open up. But: Who owns the data? What about privacy?
The answers to these concerns may come in the form of deeper collaboration with customers, making them partners who must also understand the value they are gaining by contributing data about themselves. In the health care industry, where privacy is obviously a bright-red concern, the most sensible electronic medical record (EMR) “hub” appears to be the patient, or customer. Patients would own their EMR information, which they could carry conveniently on a card that would ease integration with HMO, hospital, or other c-commerce participants. However, it may take a long time for current data owners to relinquish their power over patient data, for various legal and economic reasons.
Whether they follow the patient-owned EMR vision or not, health care organizations as well as those in a range of industries must find ways to make c-commerce benefit CRM and customer knowledge, rather than destroy it. Robert DeSisto, a GartnerGroup research director, described how businesses must look at c-commerce as a vehicle for “locking in” relationships by injecting themselves into all stages of customers’ processes. “E-CRM is about broadening the footprint as quickly as possible,” DeSisto observed.
If they don’t already, customers in a c-commerce world will expect that all customer contact points—call center, physical store, Web site, email marketing—are integrated. Few organizations can boast this ability today. DeSisto advocated that organizations begin to build toward “realtime relationship management” and move away from today’s passive style. “Why wait until the customer calls?” he asked.
Buzzwords come and go, but c-commerce is no buzzword phenomenon. Right now, it is closer to one of those “moving walkway” daydreams than a reality. But c-commerce offers a forward-thinking vision of how the Internet can enable globally shared business growth. For better or worse, it may also prove to be a line of defense to protect some industries against the dangers of the Napster economy.
David Stodder (dstodder@cmp.com) is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.
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