EDInomics with Steve Keifer

CarpEDIem – My New Squidoo Lens – A Companion to the EDInomics Blog

Last year the new lens I introduced a Squidoo lens focused on “Implementing a B2B e-Commerce Program.”   Today, I am introducing a second lens entitled CarpEDIem.  Why a second lens?  CarpEDIem has a different mission than the B2B e-Commerce Lens.  In CarpEDIem, my goal was to highlight the importance that B2B e-Commerce plays in the global economy and to encourage more businesses to further invest in their B2B programs.  Only 50% of the transactions that could be automated with e-Commerce are using B2B technology today.   As a result, businesses must contend with parallel business processes - half paper-based and half digital. This is not only bad for the manufacturers, retailers, banks and hospitals who have not been able to fully optimize their business processes, but it is bad for all of us consumers who purchase goods and services from these companies. When automation can occur to maximize efficiency not only do costs decline, but customer service improves and product innovation accelerates.

Six Degrees to B2B e-Commerce – e-Book

Last Year, I introduced a series of posts about how every activity in your life is no more than six degrees away from a process that is supported by B2B integration.   Wikipedia defines Six Degrees of Separation as “The idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.”  Today GXS is introducing a new e-Book on the topic of Six Degrees to B2B e-Commerce.  An e-Book is a new type of marketing vehicle that performs a similar function to a white paper, but with a different approach.  e-Books are designed to spread ideas virally, but with a format that is easy to read - lots of graphics, larger fonts and landscape layout orientation.

B2B E-Commerce from 2010 to 2020 – Predictions for the Next Ten Years

Each of the past few years, GXS has published a list of predictions for the coming year.  With the start of a new decade, we have taken a different approach this year.  Instead of issuing predictions about just 2010, I asked a group of eight GXS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to offer their opinions about how changing market conditions and new technologies will impact B2B e-Commerce over the next 10 years.  We developed 10 different predictions on a wide range of topics including cloud computing, SaaS, mobility, SOA, agile development, open source, social media, sustainability, emerging markets and demand driven supply chains.

Could Community Source be a Better Approach for Supply Chain Applications?

In my last GXS post I described the relatively small number of B2B integration vendors which have embraced open source.  I this post, I will discuss a type of open sourced called "community source" which I think has high applicability for the supply chain and B2B integration.  In community source a group of companies (versus individual users) unite to develop software that solves a common business problem.   Typically the application being developed either is not available from a commercial software vendor or is available, but only via a cost-prohibitive licensing model.   There are several different models of community source, but the most popular is called a “gated community,” in which only selected member organizations contribute to the development.  The gated community concept differs from traditional open source to which the general public can contribute.   The focus of community source is not to build commercial applications for resale, but rather to create useful software that the developer community can leverage for business benefit.

Open Source in B2B Integration

There are not many examples of Open source in the B2B integration space.  Many corporate end-users and service providers are running B2B platforms on open source software such as Apache’s web server, Sun’s MySQL database or the various distributions of the Linux operating system.  But very few vendors have introduced open source models for their communications, translator or integration broker software.  Is this just an oversight by the vendor community or is there no value to be gained from open source in B2B?