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Top1. Introduction
In the past, most services that enterprises provided rested on manual services (e.g., personnel's face-to-face assistance for customers). However, services nowadays have generally been upgraded through the e-commerce environment. Because enterprises have to handle electronic-service environments, they must constantly control the information with useful tools, often in globally competitive ways.
Many enterprises face rapid global fluctuations and a high degree of competition. Enterprises must build a powerful information technology (IT) structure to face various operational conditions. Therefore, IT has evolved from being a critical success factor (CSF) to a key survival factor (KSF) Jung et al. (2007). In order to integrate information from enterprises’ various stratified departments, the enterprises themselves should introduce capable information systems. Large-scale integration and use of unifying information systems can facilitate the sharing of knowledge within enterprises. For example, electronic data interchange (EDI) systems can quickly deliver data within enterprises. Although EDI can reduce labor costs and information-transmission time, EDI suffers from standard unconformities. For example, to deliver information with different specifications in different platforms is a significant source of wasted time in enterprises—that is, it is highly inefficient. Systems’ response times constitute a CSF for enterprises’ e-commerce services. Many enterprises, not surprisingly, are keen to acquire delivery systems that operate according to standardized, normal data formats resting on a heterogeneous platform. Hence, how to use standardized management techniques efficiently has become a substantial challenge for many enterprises. This study addresses the issue by adopting XML for data expression and Web services for the transmission of HTTP technology.
Figure 1 shows the basic processes of this research, wherein a management platform improves a given business-process architecture.
Figure 1. Improving business-process architecture
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Internal Processes: Enterprises examine their internal processes to identify frequently used ones. This physical process can the efficiency of operations owing to IT architecture (e.g., salary settlements and punch clocks).
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External Processes: Enterprises can survey relevant external processes and can perform processes to meet customer needs (e.g., opening a bank account and conducting credit checks for small loans).
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General Business-Process Management Platform: Enterprises convert actions into information. Enterprises, using the electronic service pool of a general business-process management platform, can find processes that meet enterprise needs.
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Corporate Behavior: Enterprises can use service-oriented architecture (SOA) for an established platform that provides service components capable of improving business processes.
This study is organized into five sections. Section 1 introduces the research motivations and research issues. Section 2 reviews the key literature on e-services, Web 2.0, and business-process management. Section 3 presents an e-service framework for e-business. Section 4 describes an implementation of the proposed framework. Section 5 provides a simple case study. Finally, Section 6 briefly concludes the paper with a summary and discussion.
TopMany experts and scholars have provided different research methods to identify standards and procedures for entity services, so there is no unified method. In contrast, most experts and scholars have provided clear definitions for Web services and electronic services. We hope that enterprises using the Internet to provide customers with electronic services will use the current study’s electronic-service features. Electronic services can reduce the cognitive gap between electronic-service providers and electronic-service requesters.