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March 1, 2003

Living Large

The reports of collaborative commerce's demise have been greatly exaggerated

by Justin Kestelyn

I have a favorite line in Martin Scorsese's controversial film The Last Temptation of Christ. Having been resurrected by Christ from the eternal hereafter, Lazarus is asked whether he preferred being dead or being alive. "There wasn't that much difference," he answers.

In 2003, some three years after the new economy fell off a cliff, we can say much the same about collaborative commerce. Although the concept has been left for dead by the mainstream business media, many companies are in fact using strategic IT-enabled, collaboration-focused strategies to improve business process execution to create competitive separation from rivals. The results are real: Consider that in early December 2002, Intel claimed that it has used the RosettaNet XML-based e-business language to process supply chain transactions valued at $5 billion. The company says that it now executes more than 30,000 RosettaNet-based transactions per month.

As Michael Brown and Derek Sappenfield explain in this issue's cover story ("Collaborative Commerce: Not Dead Yet"), the intense focus on execution, cost containment, and revenue in 21st century business, combined with the emergence of new standards that lower the cost of implementing high-value collaborative processes, is making collaborative commerce more fruitful in its "afterlife" than it was in its heyday. Process areas such as product design, fulfillment, demand and supply planning, and manufacturing now offer more viable opportunities for collaboration than we've seen before. (This fact isn't lost on enterprise applications companies such as J.D. Edwards, SAP, and Siebel Systems, which are elevating cross-application integration to the top of the their respective priority lists; see Jeanette Burriesci's "Open Door Policy," News & Analysis, Feb. 1, 2003.)

Even so, Brown and Sappenfield correctly point out that the best intentions are doomed without a coherent, carefully developed strategic IT architecture that enables system-to-system, machine-to-machine, and application-to-application integration and accommodates a diverse network of trading partners; collaborative commerce transformation is simply too risky and complex for an ad hoc approach. With their reference model in hand, you could be in good position to give your dormant collaborative commerce initiatives new life.

Our Bet on BPM

Is business performance management (BPM) the culmination of the drive to make business intelligence and analytics the "brains" of the entire enterprise? Does it finally provide the elusive framework through which these technologies can deliver their maximum business value?

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We think so, and for that reason, Intelligent Enterprise is formalizing BPM as a core ingredient in our editorial formula: In the next issue (March 20), contributing editor Mark Smith debuts a new column focusing exclusively on the complex business, technology, and management issues that BPM implementers are sure to encounter.

Mark will also serve as the community editor for IntelligentBPM (www.intelligentBPM.com), the industry's first independent online forum for news, features, analysis, and discussion focusing on these important issues. Log in today to let us know what you think!