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In the past few years, e-commerce and enterprise computing have been successfully established as a significant community in most international professional CS societies. Although most people think of e-commerce as “online shopping”, the technology and its application are now much broader and encompass most business processes in modern enterprises. Researchers in e-commerce have looked into topics such as marketing and advertising technology, supply chain coordination, service management, and workflow technology. The research is not done in business schools only; there is a growing engineering community focusing on technical and algorithmic issues on the business process level. Although, e-commerce in its narrow scope of “online shopping” has had its peak, technical advances on the business process level are seeing a lot of new innovation these days including
- Business process management and optimization
- Marketing and advertising technology
- Auction and negotiation technology
- IT service management
While enterprise computing is traditionally focused more on internal business processes and e-commerce describes the various interactions with external entities, this distinction is increasingly difficult to make in a networked economy. Needless to say, both areas have seen enormous technical developments throughout the past few years and face similar challenges.
The last decade, for example, has seen enormous efforts in the area of integration technology, such as web services computing, which, at the same time, has led to a lot of standardization and commoditization in the field. This doesn’t mean that innovation stops. Once products become commodities, they can serve as components for further innovation. An obvious consequence of the advances in web services computing is that it enables business services networks, which pose a number of new technical challenges focused on how to support collaboration and orchestrate and optimize processes across organizations.
Another challenge and a consequence of the availability of business services networks, broadband network connections, and RFID technology is the resulting “information explosion”. Businesses collect huge amounts of data on customers, suppliers and market developments and need to be able to analyze and react on this quickly.
Overall, e-commerce and enterprise computing have emerged into an engineering discipline and a design science centered on technical artifacts for business service integration and business process optimization. Enterprise computing draws on a variety of established disciplines such as computer science, operations research, and business administration and develops new technologies and methods geared towards business process innovation (i.e., optimizing existing or creating new business processes) for the purpose of optimizing business objectives.
The Technical Committee on Electronic Commerce (TCEC) acts as an international forum to promote E-Commerce research and education, and participate in setting up technical standards in this area. Issues related to the design, analysis and implementation of E-Commerce systems and solutions are of interest. These include design and analysis of distributed architectures and enabling technologies (e.g. Autonomic computing, Grid, Web Services, etc.) and application development on E-Commerce system.
The Technical Committee on Electronic Commerce (TCEC) sponsors professional meetings, publishes newsletters and other documents, sets guidelines for educational programs, and it helps co-ordinate academic, funding agency, and industry activities in the above areas. The TCEC organizes annual conferences. In addition, TCEC plans to publish a newsletter to help IEEE/Computer Society members keep abreast of the events occurring within this field.
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