电子商务到企业转型英文文献和中文翻译(3)

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companies and industries has led to the emergence of value nets and of business ecosystems.

Emerging technologies such as RFID for all kinds of sensing and tracking, web service composition and workflows, business process modeling, supply chain optimization techniques, data mining technologies to detect emerging new patterns, etc. have increasingly penetrated all parts of a value network lifecycle. However, despite the significant progress made in the use of technology for transforming or creating value nets, critical questions remain open:

• How do value net companies sense and quickly react to challenges from innovators in the markets the net serves, how is the value net transformed, including its own products and services, and how can it monitor and evaluate the performance of these strategic changes?

• Innovation not only creates new markets, it may also radically transform the way a business process is executed. How can a company or a value net detect this on time, and quickly transform its business processes so as to stay competitive?

• Is it possible to move from KPIs and future market indicators to business strategy, then to business processes and finally to their implementation through human and software agents and then back again to monitor and evaluate process performance against the KPIs, in an automatic or even semi-automatic way? Notice that this should be done not for a single company but for a group of companies belonging to a value net, with possibly conflicting KPIs.

• How does one devise strategies for companies to follow, which will allow them to decide which value net(s) to join? How do companies in a value net decide whether or not to accept a newcomer? Notice that IT (strategic) outsourcing and Business Process Transformation Services (BPTS), see [2], are special cases of these more general questions.

• Strategic vs. “Grounded” Innovation: most of the discussion about "On Demand Business" and "Business Process Management" is strongly influenced by the assumption that the direction and impulse for innovation comes top down. Management changes the business strategy to respond to new market situations or analysis of the CBM of the organization. The question then is how to communicate and implement the new strategy given the corporate culture, organization and IT landscape. Another (maybe less fundamental but equally important) direction of innovation is bottom up. The help desk people hear from unhappy customers, people in the production observe ineffective processes, efficiency and quality of some processes have high (unexplained) variance. This is the area of quality management, lean sigma, etc. Here the basic question is how to enable employees to see the business impact of their actions and how to empower them to collaborate to continuously improve their performance. We call this the "grounded" approach to innovation as suggestions for change will be grounded in the experience and observations of the employees and the ideas for improvements will equally be grounded in what they know. The challenge here is more to provide employees with visibility of their impact, with sensible benchmarks and with knowledge of best practices and possible improvements.

• Trust management and security policy issues: the extra value created for value nets both for the value net partners themselves and for their customers is the tight linkage of the partners achieved within the value net. This presupposes a high level of trust between the partners, which has to be built-up as the value net evolves, and could be easily destroyed if one of the partners behaves unreliably, or even maliciously. Therefore, trust building and relationship monitoring is an important operational issue of every value net.

We are proposing a theoretical framework for estimating the value of a value net. Through this frame work, we are also proposing a methodology for addressing the issues listed above and for guiding the transformation of the value net and of its business processes, all with the general objective of achieving a higher overall value for the value net.