Emerging Technologies for Business Collaboration

Chapter Key Points

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  Describes what comprises emerging technologies of today.

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  Discusses the manner in which the emerging technologies facilitate business collaboration.

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  Discusses the role of Web Services (WS) technology in dynamic business collaboration.

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  Discusses the use of Mobile technology in dynamic business collaboration.

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  Discusses the use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) in dynamic collaboration.

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  Discuss the use of Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in dynamic collaboration.

Appreciating Emerging Technologies

This chapter describes the fundamentals of technologies such as Web Services (WS) and mobile technologies that provide the basis for modem-day business collaboration. These technologies, introduced here, are further discussed and evaluated later in Chapter 5 from the point of view of demonstrating their application to the CBPE environment. With the use of WS and mobile technologies, clients and users of organizations can access their applications from anywhere and at any time regardless of their physical location and platform. Appreciation of the capabilities of WS opens up many opportunities for businesses to interact with each other electronically. This chapter starts by identifying the important issues already extant in current ways in which businesses collaborate with each other. These issues and their understanding provide a good starting point for businesses to consider basing their strategies on collaborative services. While electronic collaboration has been investigated in the past, there has not been an ample focus on the dynamic aspect of such collaborations that result from the rapidly evolving communications technologies. This dynamic aspect of collaboration, based on Internet-based communications, is also explored in this chapter. The opportunities for many different groups or categories of organizations to collaborate – such as business, government and community sector organizations is also considered here. Formal analysis of collaboration, their business processes, their organizational structures and the support technologies and applications can provide many benefits including:

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  Ability to leverage strengths and expertise of various organizations that may not be in physical proximity and, instead, spread globally

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  Access to information, knowledge and even material and other production resources that would lower costs through their sharing and smart sourcing

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  Improved service coordination across multiple organizations with better pathways or referral systems for customers

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  One-stop-shop for customers looking for multiple services over the Internet

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  Holistic and efficient approach to meeting client needs with wide range of services, enhanced quality and consistent responsiveness.

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  Organizational knowledge and improved service system capability that includes greater innovation, flexibility to respond to emerging client needs and changing operations and operational environments

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  Increased capacity to successfully submit tenders or expressions of interest to agencies through collaboration amongst partners.