ABSTRACT
The Internet facilitates this by providing a universally available backbone for sharing information among customers, distributors, manufacturers, and suppliers — the so-called “supply chain.” All businesses leverage a variety of information to deliver products, plan for resource needs, and manage the overall business. This information can take many forms — the content that businesses leverage to achieve competitive advantage has traditionally included structured, nondynamic data like databases and delimited or fixed-field data files. Increasingly, organizations need to further leverage the nonstructured information served up by technology such as ERP-packaged solutions, legacy operational systems, e-mail systems, business reporting systems, and middleware frameworks. With the advent of the Internet, this has grown to include dynamic, nonstructured information such as Web information (HTML, XML), content-management systems and Web-enabled applications (such as catalogs). Those companies that are able to share timely information across the entire supply chain will become the new leaders in their industries or will increase their lead on their less nimble competitors. In some industries, laggards risk being driven out of business completely, as some industries will be so transformed by the Internet as to make its adoption as a core business platform a requirement for doing business.
