Introduction to E-business infrastructure

Defining an adequate technology infrastructure is vital to all companies adopting e-business. The infrastructure directly affects the quality of service experienced by users of the systems in terms of speed and responsiveness. The e-business services provided through a standardized infrastructure also determine the capability of an organization to compete through differenti­ating itself in the marketplace. Mcafee and Brynjolfsson (2008) suggest that to use digital technology to support competition the mantra for the CEO should be:

‘Deploy, innovate, and propagate’: First, deploy a consistent technology platform. Then separate yourself from the pack by coming up with better ways of working. Finally, use the platform to propagate these business innovations widely and reliably. In this regard, deploying IT serves two distinct roles -as a catalyst for innovative ideas and as an engine for delivering them.

E-business infrastructure refers to the combination of hardware such as servers and client PCs in an organization, the network used to link this hardware and the software applications used to deliver services to workers within the e-business and also to its partners and cus­tomers. Infrastructure also includes the architecture of the networks, hardware and software and where it is located. Finally, infrastructure can also be considered to include the methods for publishing data and documents accessed through e-business applications. A key decision with managing this infrastructure is which elements are located within the company and which are managed externally as third-party managed applications, data servers and networks.

It is also important that the e-business infrastructure and the process of reviewing new technology investments be flexible enough to support changes required by the business to compete effectively. For example, for the media there are many new technologies being developed which were described from 2005 onwards as Web 2.0 and IPTV (television deliv­ered over the broadband Internet). We will look at these approaches later in this chapter, but for now look at the implications in the Real-world e-business experiences interview and consider the implications for the newspaper publishing industry. In a speech to the Ameri­can Society of Newspaper Editors in April 2005, Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation said:

Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint’s obituary. Yet, as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent. Certainly, I didn’t do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.

Well it hasn’t… it won’t…. And it’s a fast developing reality we should grasp as a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach. (News Corporation, 2005)

We refer above to an adequate e-business infrastructure, but what does this mean? For the manager in the e-business, this is a key question. While it is important to be able to under­stand some of the technical jargon and concepts when talking to third-party suppliers of hardware, software and services, what is of crucial importance is to be aware of some of the limitations (and also the business potential) of the infrastructure. Through being aware of these problems, managers of an organization can work with their partners to ensure a good level of service is delivered to everyone, internal and external, who is using the e-business infrastructure. To highlight some of the problems that may occur if the infrastructure is not managed correctly, complete Activity 3.1. It illustrates how companies should think about risks and solutions to these risks.

E-business infrastructure components

Figure 3.1 summarizes how the different components of e-business architecture which need to be managed relate to each other. The different components can be conceived of as different layers with defined interfaces between each layer. The different layers can best beunderstood in relation to a typical task performed by a user of  an e-business system. For example, an employee who needs to book a holiday will access a specific human resources application or program that has been created to enable the holiday to be booked (Level I in Figure 3.1). This application will enable a holiday request to be entered and will forward the
application to their manager and human resources department for approval. To access the application, the employee will use a web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome using an operating system such as Microsoft Windows XP or Apple OS X (Level II in Figure 3.1). This systems software will then request transfer of the information about the holiday request across a network or transport layer (Level III in Figure 3.1). The information will then be stored in computer memory (RAM) or in long­term magnetic storage on a web server (Level IV in Figure 3.1). The information itself which makes up the web pages or content viewed by the employee and the data about their holiday request are shown as a separate layer (Level V in Figure 3.1), although it could be argued that this is the first or second level in an e-business architecture.

Kampas (2000) describes an alternative five-level infrastructure model of what he refers to as ‘the information system function chain’:

1. Storage/physical. Memory and disk hardware components (equivalent to Level IV in Figure 3.1).
2. Processing. Computation and logic provided by the processor (processing occurs at Levels I and II in Figure 3.1).
3. Infrastructure. This refers to the human and external interfaces and also the network, referred to as ‘extrastructure’. (This is Level III in Figure 3.1, although the human or external interfaces are not shown there.)
4. Application/content. This is the data processed by the application into information. (This is Level V in Figure 3.1.)
5. Intelligence. Additional computer-based logic that transforms information to knowledge. (This is also part of the application layer I in Figure 3.1.)

Each of these elements of infrastructure presents separate management issues which we will consider separately. In this chapter, infrastructure management issues are introduced, while more detailed discussion of management solutions is presented in Chapters 10, 11 and 12.

We start our coverage of e-business infrastructure by considering the technical infrastruc­ture for the Internet, extranets, intranets and the World Wide Web which are Levels II and III in Figure 3.1.

We then look at how these facilities work by reviewing the standards that are used to enable electronic communications, including communications standards such as TCP/IP and EDI and publishing standards such as HTML and XML.

In the second part of the chapter, some management issues of hosting e-business services are then reviewed, specifically management of Level I applications and services by external parties and how to manage staff access to the Internet. Finally, we focus on how new access platforms such as mobile phones and interactive digital TV will change the way the Internet is used in the future (Level II in Figure 3.1).

We return to some issues of e-business infrastructure management later in this book. Table 3.1 provides a summary of the main issues facing businesses and where they are cov­ered in this chapter and later in the book.

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).