E-business: Issues, challenges and architecture

At present, a large number of organisations are spending huge amounts of their budget on Information Technologies infrastructure. It has been found that most of these investments are not utilised efficiently and effectively. This paper reviews some of the major challenges, and management and technical issues related to an e-business architecture design and implementation. It discusses the importance of alignment of e-business strategy with e-business architecture, reasons for failures of e-businesses, success factors and risks. The paper also proposes a high-level Web Service-Oriented Architecture (WSOA) for e-business. The proposed architecture specifies a methodology to progressively deploying e-business through instantiations for each business interaction (e.g., B2B), and the requirements for its implementing technology platform. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a better methodology for Enterprise Architecture (EA). The WSOA is composed of three layers: business processes, an interactions manager and disparate information systems. This approach offers significant advantages over the traditional e-business architectures.