Surveying and Mapping the Dimensions of Electronic Business (EB). Building a Generalized Enterprise EB model.
EB supports Functional, Interaction, Analysis, and Transaction (FIAT) work, both internally to the business enterprise and externally with its environment. Markets and ePortals are major enabling mechanisms of EB.
Business Functions: Activities performed in achieving the business mission, consist of three interdependent work activities: production, support, and executive.
Business Interactions: The communication, coordination, and collaboration behaviors, whether dynamic or modeled, taking place between two active entities (i.e., person, group, organization, and machine) to enable business functions, transactions, and analyses.
Business Analyses: The behaviors, either modeled or dynamic, to derive contextually relevant understanding (of events, signals, data, information, meaning, knowledge, intelligence, awareness, and wisdom) from functional transaction, interaction, and environmental data and signals, and to provide the results as information products to the business or its customers. Analysis products are changed, interchanged or exchanged. Analysis services entail interchange of information. See diagram.
Business Transactions are those structured operational activities that lead to consistent modifications of functional value via change, interchange or exchange of some resource. See diagram.
Business Production work generates and provides the product or service defined in the mission of the business and intended to have value for business customers. The provided business product or service is a link in a dynamic chain of producers and consumers leading into and out of a business - a value-chain.
Business Support work acquires, provides, and controls the resources necessary for sustaining all business activity.
Business Executive work establishes the business mission, determines business goals, organizes the business activities, plans and directs production and support work towards those goals, and measures and adjusts business efforts towards the goals. See diagram.
Business functions, transactions, analysis, and interactions all involve change, interchange or exchange.
Business Change entails modifying the state or value of some tangible thing (e.g., forming an auto fender from sheet metal) or intangible thing (e.g., informing via contextually relevant data or signal). Change is the foundation of management activity.
Change involves a carrier of change, a container of change, and change content.
A carrier of change would be some communication or transportation mechanism.
A container of change would be an organized arrangement of change activities.
Change content would be the activity involved in achieving change for individual entities.
For example, a company executive may announce a change effort over the company's email "carrier" to all company employees, suppliers, customers, service-providers, and board of directors. The executive would describe the rationale and approach the change effort will take inside the email "container". The recipients would open the "container" and read the email "contents" to gain information about the effort. The carrier enables communication. The container packages the informational content and provides the receiver contextually relevant categorizing information, known as metadata, about the contents. The content itself provides the recipient the information intended for them by the executive's email. If the recipient does not know they have an email from the executive, they are uninformed. If the recipient knows they have the executive's email, but do not read and assimilate the subject, date, and sender metadata, they are uninformed on the executive's intent. If the recipient knows the email metadata, but does not read the email contents, they are uninformed of the executive's plan and its impact on them.
If the email carrier, container, and content do result in the recipient's change, they are not information, but noise. If the recipient receives too many emails to process their container data, this noise results in "information overload" of the recipient. If the email content is not relevant to the recipient's context, the email information distracts the recipient from their intended behaviors, which is also information overload.
Interchange entails physical or virtual movement of an intangible thing (e.g., information, emotion) via a physical (i.e., analog/natural signal) or virtual (i.e., machine-enabled analog or digital signal) communication medium. This results in the intangible thing being shared between the sender and receiver, thus leading to the multiplication (a X b) of the thing's value (a) times the number of recipients (b). Interchange is the foundation of educational and ePortal activity. Interchange requires passing of information content and container metadata over a "carrier" which links sender and receiver.
Interchanges types: Person to Person, Person to Group, Person to Organization, Person to Machine, Group to Group, Group to Organization, Group to Machine, Organization to Machine, Machine to Machine. (PP, PG, PO, PM, GG, GO, GM, OM, MM respectively)
Exchange entails physical movement of a tangible thing from the possession by one entity into the possession of another entity. Exchange often takes place with a reciprocal physical exchange or physical/virtual interchange of equal value. Exchange is the foundation of economic market activity.
For example, I may purchase a book with money in a bookstore or over the web, which is an exchange (direct "carrier" of change is physical transfer the bookstore, indirect "carrier" of change is the Web payment and Fedex delivery). The book is a unique entity, and the money is a controlled and unique entity. I have exchanged the book, and in reading the title, author, price, publication data, etc., I have gained information about the "container". If I read the book, I gain information from its "content". The carrier and container of information are not likely to change the recipient, but the content, if it is "informing" to the recipient, will change them in some way.
Business: The occupation, work, or trade in which a person, group, or organization is engaged: the wholesale food business.
Enterprise: A purposeful human endeavor. Enterprise as Object: See diagram1 and diagram2.
Value: Worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor; utility or merit.
Value-chain: The coordinated life cycle flow of products and services between internal and external link/node activities, proceeding from an initial raw/natural state through to the recycling after consumer disposal. Also known as work (behavior) automation and workflow. See diagram1, diagram2, and diagram3.
Workflow: See value-chain.
Market: A place where products and services are offered for Exchange or Interchange.
ePortal: A virtual market supporting a community of persons, groups, organizations, and machines, which enables Interchange, and thus supports Exchange and Change. An ePortal provides an advanced and more generalized form of electronic data interchange. See diagram.
C2B: Consumer to Business Interchange, possibly resulting in an Exchange and Change within a market. Also known as e-Commerce.
B2B: Business to Business Interchange, possibly resulting in an Exchange within a market. Also known as e-Business. An earlier form of B2B is traditional Electronic Data Interchange.
Portal to Portal: Community to Community Interchange, possibly resulting in Exchange across markets. The net effect is a pooling of buyers and suppliers
Communication: The act of passing signals, data, information, knowledge, intelligence, awareness, or wisdom between sender and recipient over some carrier.
Coordination: The act of organizing activity sequentiality so that the actions are achieved in a planned order. Sequentiality is the organization of activities so that they operate in parallel and/or serial form, in unbroken (synchronous) and/or broken (asynchronous) streams of events.
Collaboration: The act of multiple entities creating products and services within a work environment shared between the entities.
Management: The resolution of complexity, diversity, and chaos in science, society, and spirit into a dynamic system of controlled order. See diagram
Economy: The process of exchanging tangible goods, and intangible products and services, between people.
Education: The process of interchanging information, intelligence, knowledge, awareness, and wisdom between people.
Resource: A tangible or intangible object having value at some point in a value chain.
Context: The understanding a person, group, organization, or machine has of a situation's relevance to them or some other object. Context is formed by tracking of internal and external events, which generate event signals, which are collected as signal data, which is organized and presented as information, which is expressed as knowledge, which is applied as intelligence, which contributes to awareness, which contributes to wisdom, which facilitates appropriate response behaviors to the situation. Context is categorized in six basic dimensions, with various sub-dimensions. See diagram.
The dimensions' top level categories are:
By categorizing an object in each of the six dimensions, thus associating it with other objects in those dimensions, we can analyze the object from those six perspectives, and become aware of how a change in one dimension will affect the object's other dimensions, and that object's impact on other objects. See diagram.
By tracking changes in categorization or association, we gain understanding of the history, plans, and status of an object in relation to other objects.
Dynamic behaviors: Behaviors that are unplanned and/or outside a defined process, and thus difficult to change or interchange.
Modeled behaviors: Behaviors that are planned and/or within a defined process, and thus are easier to change or interchange.
Possess: To own or otherwise have control.
Activity: See diagram.
Input: The resources consumed by an activity.
Control: The constraints on an activity.
Output: The result of performing an activity.
Product: That portion of the output passed to a customer via interchange or exchange.
Byproduct: The output not passed to a customer.
Outcome: The change in the customer resulting from receiving products, and the change in the business or environment resulting from the products and byproducts.
Mechanism: The resources enabling an activity, which are not consumed by the activity.