E-Commerce Software: From Analysis to Design

Abstract

Early information systems were mainly built around secondary, administrative processes of the value chain (e.g., accounting). But since the Internet came into use, more and more primary processes have become accessible to automation: customer acquisition, ordering, billing and, in the case of intangible goods such as software, even delivery. To facilitate this complex task, we suggest that the relevant parts of the enterprise be modeled according to the MEMO (Multi-perspective Enterprise MOdeling) method. It allows for the description of an enterprise on three levels-strategy, organization and information system-and from four angles-process, structure, resources and goals. All partial models for the views are integrated via a common object-oriented core. In this framework we suggest a modeling language for the IS layer, the Event-driven Method Chain (EMC), a process-oriented language based on Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs), which we adapt to fit both the MEMO framework and the object-oriented paradigm, thus making it suitable for the development of Web-based applications in an object-oriented programming language. To illustrate this we use the example of a software trading company.