Lesson 1

The rapid changes in the Internet make it difficult for any business to establish long-term e-business architecture. According to Forrester Research, e-Commerce revenues will expand from 0.2% of total business sales in 1997 to 9% of total business sales (or $1.3 trillion) by the year 2003. With this rapid expansion, it can be difficult to design a proper architecture to support the ever-expanding needs of e-Businesses.
In this module, you will learn how companies are using e-Business architecture to conduct business. Namely, you will learn about e-Business relationships, e-Business models, and various means of delivering e-Business.

An architects working group has developed several builds on the original work to enhance support by tools. This paper reflects these refinements and provides a set of standard business concepts and guidance as to how to use them to instantiate organized knowledge about specific enterprises. This set is a high-level semantic framework that has been developed over a considerable length of time. The concepts that are presented here have been abstracted from experience with many specific enterprise business models, various generic industry reference models, and several years of experience in organizing business terminology for specific businesses. A set of generic concepts and their interrelationships organize business information content in terms of requirements on the business, the boundary of the business, and the business as a system for delivery of value. Methods are introduced to explore variations on the basic business concept patterns. These concepts are positioned to describe IT systems that support the business, and they are used to manage the work of IT system development and deployment.

A complete architectural specification of an information technology (IT) system includes information about how it is partitioned and how the parts are interrelated. It also contains information about what it should do and the purpose it must serve in the business. This module provides a set of business concepts that partition the world of business meaning. It discusses the purpose of such an architectural view of business and ways in which it can be used.
Business today is interlinked with information system technology. From the smallest home office business supported by a shrink-wrap^[1] business suite, to the multinational corporation with multiple monolithic legacy applications, it is impossible to be in business today without confronting the issues of supporting the business with software. Sn interlocking semantic framework is necessary in order to understand and create the software solutions for the enterprise of today and the future and focuses on the business concepts that underlie information technology (IT) systems.

[1] shrink-wrap: to wrap and seal (a book, a food product, etc.) in a flexible film of plastic that, when exposed to a heating process, shrinks to the contour of the merchandise.