B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

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6.1. The Need for a Universal Language
In order to participate in B2B e-commerce, companies are moving
towards customer self-servicing, enterprise application integration and
dynamic partnering with external companies and exchanges. This changing
nature of doing business has significantly increased the complexities of
processing business data. The data in this business environment can be
found in varied formats, such as messages from different trading partners,
internal corporate documents, messages from retail customers, several
interfaces to transaction-based systems, databases and Web pages.
Capturing, managing and effectively using business data has become a
wobbly task.
Due to the lack of a universal data interchange format, companies
are not able to fully exploit automation, both internally and externally,
that would enable seamless communication between internal applications
and external partner applications. As a result, most information
technology departments spend upwards of 40% of their time in extracting,
re-defining and updating data to serve specific needs, according to a
recent survey from Forrester Research.
It is impossible to even dream of B2Bi based on the Internet,
without a universal language that is understood by every party involved
in integration. Through the use of this language, companies will be
able to transact business across organizational boundaries. Its use in
exchanging business data among cross-organization applications is a
key requirement for e-business success.
Companies in the same vertical industry that usually relate to each
other as competitors, will benefit tremendously by collaborating on a
universal data exchange format for business documents, such as invoices
and purchase orders. All the companies have to participate in this
transition to universal data format language for it to be successful. So,
apart from adoption by the Fortune 1000 companies, it also has to be
embraced by an estimated 25,000,000 small and medium enterprises
(SMEs) in the world.
Let's briefly review Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), a traditional
method — and still the dominant way companies exchange information
electronically.