A Knowledge-based Approach to e-Business for Virtual Enterprises

This phase of the economic development is heavily influenced by the IT applications, by web solutions and Internet related technologies. Two important factors that the Internet has brought to the business domain are speed and globalisation. About speed, in a recent interview, Ellison (the CEO of Oracle) said that in the Old Economy the Big [corporation] used to eat the Small, today, in the New Economy, the Fast eats the Slow. About globalisation, today we have the evidence about the Global Village anticipated by McLuan, and in particular enterprises operate with a decreasing concern about national, cultural, or geographical boundaries.

In this scenario, Virtual Enterprises represent a recent phenomenon produced by the speed and the globalisation of the Internet. A Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a temporary panel of real enterprises that cooperate to make business. A VE is created to respond quickly to a market demand (speed) and is composed by partners that do not necessarily know each other before, having an organisation, a culture and operating procedures (i.e., Business Processes) of their own. The VE logic requires that, despite the many differences, they start to effectively interoperate in a short span of time and they make business as if they were one single company.

In creating a VE, the main issue is the necessity to reach a good level of "acquaintance" in a short time, to guarantee an effective inter-enterprise cooperation. This can by significantly supported in presence of an enterprise knowledge base (EKB) for each partner company, that describes fundamental characteristics, such as its structure, operating procedures, skill possessed. In this talk a Knowledge-based approach to VE will be presented, starting from the identification of the fundamental aspects of a (real) enterprise that must be modeled, and indicating how the EKB may be used in creating and operating a VE.

 
Referent:    Dr. Michele Missikoff,
             Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems, IASI-CNR
             Rome, Italy

Zeitpunkt:   Donnerstag, 17. August 2000, 16:00 Uhr

Ort:         HS 3 der Universität Klagenfurt

Michele Missikoff, Coordinator of LEKS, Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems, at IASI-CNR (Rome, Italy), has a long experience on knowledge representation and databases. In the last years he focussed his attention to enterprise knowledge bases and, in particular, to the impact they may have with the enterprise-wide application packages, often indicated with the acronym ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning, such as SAP).

He served in the Program Committees of primary international conferences in the field and in the editorial boards of important international journals. He is co-founder and past president of EDBT Foundation, the international organisation that promotes EDBT Conferences. He participated and leaded several international and national research projects. In his activity he produced more than one hundred papers, the half of which at international level.