B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

40 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
be successful. For the successful implementation of B2Bi, all the business
departments of a company have to work hand-in-hand with the technology
department. The whole company has to be mobilized and all departments
(sales, marketing, distribution, purchasing) have to adopt new business
models and that is hard stuff.
2.4.9. Standards and industry issues
The lack of industry standards for conducting business-to-business
transactions over the Internet is a major deterrent to implementing B2Bi
for many companies.
The main challenge in using XML is not with document structure
and syntax, but with the semantics of the document which represents a
business process. Several companies and industry groups have proposed
a variety of different XML extensions and protocols. No one knows
which standards will survive in the long run.
2.4.10. Distributed control
B2Bi involves interaction and congruence among multiple IT groups,
multiple business user communities and multiple groups of decisionmakers.
Each group has an independent set of goals and requirements.
Anything that involves high levels of agreement or the intertwining of
systems and people is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to
maintain. With the increase in the number of partners that a company
wants to integrate with, the problems associated with distributed control
take precedence over all other problems.
2.4.11. Performance and scalability
B2Bi requires real-time aggregation or distribution of information across
dozens or hundreds of companies. Such a type of distributed architecture,
if not properly designed, can significantly hurt the performance of
applications. Delays of only a few seconds in B2B transactions can
result in significant losses to trading partners. This can potentially
result in disappointed customers and damaged working relationships.