Abstract

Advancements in information and communication technology pave the way for a new class of business systems: e-commerce systems. These systems differ from traditional business systems in that they almost constitute the business rather than that they merely support the business of an organization. As a consequence, business and technology issues are intertwined in such a way that it is not sufficient anymore to consider them in isolation. For this reason, we argue that an integrated approach to e-commerce system development is required with which we can assess the impact of a business model on the information system and vice versa. In our approach, which we call e3-VALUE, an e-commerce system is considered from three architectural areas: business value, business process, and software architecture area. These three architectural areas cater for the needs of the various stakeholders involved in the development process at such an abstraction level that qualitative assessments can be made without getting buried by details. A scenario-based technique, represented by Use Case Maps (UCM), is used to relate the different architectural levels. The e3-VALUE approach is illuminated by means of an elaborated case study. Although it is too early to draw definite conclusions from this and other case studies that we have conducted, we did learn some important lessons. The first important lesson is that the case studies suggest that e-commerce systems can indeed be assessed qualitatively at a high level of abstraction as provided by the three architectural areas. The second important lesson is that an integrated approach can reveal organisational consequences that are not obvious from a business model alone.

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