The current issue of Information Systems Frontiers focuses on new advances and emerging trends in next generation virtual enterprises and pervasive/mobile computing. The issue consists of articles that were expanded for journal publication from those that were either nominated for the best paper award or were invited plenary keynotes at an IEEE/ACM conference - the Academia/Industry Working Conference on Research Challenges (AIWoRC’00) that was held at SUNY at Buffalo in 2000. These articles are focused on the analysis and discussion of how pervasive/mobile technologies and virtual enterprises would revolutionize business strategies and change the business culture in the next millennium. AIWoRC’00 was produced in collaboration with INFORMS and AIS and the support of companies such as Verizon, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Empire State Development Corp., EDS, i2 Technologies, Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel, Delaware North Companies, Student Online, IBM (Canada), Oracle, ITEC and Business First.
The themes of the conference addressed several important issues. In particular, increasingly global markets, mobile workforces, and variable consumer needs are driving developments in two major areas: virtual collaborative operations, and the deployment of pervasive/mobile technologies. To effectively integrate these solutions, organizations must typically utilize (1) novel organizational structures, (2) fundamental shifts in corporate culture, commerce and economics; and (3) powerful technology enablers of virtual and mobile operations. However, these efforts present formidable challenges, which constituted the focal business and technical themes as follows.
The business themes included: Organization and group level issues, Strategic issues, Virtual teams by integrating organizations and technologies, Emerging knowledge management theory and practice, Next generation e-Commerce and the economics of next generation enterprises. The technical tracks included: Challenges and frontiers in document management and digital transaction systems, Challenges and frontiers in mobile computing technologies, Infrastructures and architectures in pervasive/mobile computing, Virtual supply chains and product development, Innovative Internet opportunities and opportunistic networking and Other next generation technology frontiers.
This issue of of Information Systems Frontiers presents a comprehensive and unique view of the emerging landscape of next generation enterprises. Further, a research monograph on “Mobile Computing: Implementing Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies” from some of the selected articles that were presented at the conference is also being published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Shambhu Upadhyaya (SUNY, Buffalo), Kevin Kwiat (Airforce Research Laboratories, Rome, NY) A. Chaudhury (Bryant College, RI) and M. Weiser (Oklahoma State University, OK) served as editors of this book.
In recent years the Internet has become more than a way of connecting computers and the people who use them together. The first paper in this issue is a thought-piece by Waldo, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and the Lead Architect of JINI. He presents a vision for the next generation virtual organizations and pervasive computing technologies and their symbiotic relationships. In this context, the Web is rapidly becoming the platform through which many companies deliver e-services to businesses and individual customers. In order to enable organizations to pursue these business eopportunities, Casati and Shan (Hewlett-Packard) present eFlow, a model and architecture they have developd to support the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services. Furthermore, Georgakopoulos et al. (Microelectronics and Computers Corporation) propose a Service Oriented Process model (SOP) for e-services and describe the architecture of the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a system that supports service activities for modeling the services themselves, primitives for composing supply chains from services and automating service coordination.
Another emerging facet of next generation enterprises is the Information Grid consisting of multiple networks and computing domains. Kwiat (Airforce Research Labs.) examines large-scale market-based information systems and their architectures within the information grid, especially in the military context. One of the biggest challenges facing the Information Grid today is to scale its infrastructure to provide quality-of-service (QoS) to a wide variety of applications and traffic types. Wood (Georgia State University) and Chatterjee (Claremont Graduate School) provide a state-of-the-art review and analysis of QoS issues in Internet and offer insights into some important problems that still remain to be solved. Szirbik (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) presents a multi-agent architecture for bargaining and negotiation support in emerging e-commerce practices in Internet-enabled communities. Kalyan (i2 Technologies) presents an innovative model for providing decision support in next-generation manufacturing firms and supply chains by drawing from the ideas of yield management used in the airline industry. Kishore (SUNY, Buffalo) and McLean (Georgia State University) present a consolidated CIO perspective on the visions, impacts and implementation challenges facing the next-generation enterprises.
At this point, we wish to sincerely thank one of our retiring Advisory Editors Dr. N. Seshagiri, Director General, National Informatics Center, India for his considerable services and support to ISF. His inputs to the development of the journal have been invaluable. We are delighted to announce that Professor John L. King, Dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor will be joining our advisory editorial board. We extend a warm welcome to Prof. King and look forward to many years of his contributions to ISF.
And last but not least, we would like to take this opportunity to thanks the various referees who have spent a great deal of time and effort in reviewing, and have helped to refine and improve the quality of submissions to ISF. A partial list appears at the end of this volume.