ABSTRACT
Electronic commerce (EC) is a broad frontier of business transformation deploying computer telecommunication networks and allied information technologies. Although EC as we understand it today was born in the early 1990s, with the Internet becoming its primary vehicle, we can see its precursor emerging decades earlier based on wide-area networks and electronic data interchange (EDI). Properly understood, EC encompasses inter-and intraorganizational segments, as well as businessto-consumer commerce. For a period of time, EC was seen by many as limited to the last segment, or, roughly, to selling consumer goods and services over the Internet. As will be seen in this chapter, this segment was always the most visible — if least weighty — part of EC, the tip of the iceberg. The main thrust of EC, which can best be seen in its totality as e-business, is in transforming intraorganizational processes and interorganizational collaboration and exchange by relying on the capabilities derived from the inexpensive universal connectivity of the Internet. Based on our new understanding of the field, the early notion of the autarkic development of EC into a “New Economy” has to be reconceptualized into that of the development of a more productive economy by embedding EC into it.
