Electronic Commerce
Electronic commerce is the
ability to conduct business transactions entirely electronically, from
requests for proposal, to ordering, to invoicing, to payments. Benefits
associated with electronic commerce are all associated with the speed of
processing a transaction, cutting processing costs, and increasing accuracy.
Implementing Electronic Commerce in State Government will:
-
optimize government processes
enabling the provision of timely, convenient and personalized services;
-
reduce the costs and effort
of conducting transactions between the State and its citizens, federal
and local governments, and business partners; and
-
develop goodwill and establish
trusted and positive relations between the State and its citizens, federal
and local governments, and business partners.
The electronic commerce world
has changed due to the issuance in January of 1998 of the Extensible Markup
Language (XML) standard by the World Wide Web Consortium. As opposed
to the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) proprietary formats, XML is open,
non-proprietary, and human readable structured data. Furthermore,
XML carries its own data schema with it, and can share schema across the
Internet, making it available to everyone. XML also makes data sharing
for all applications possible. Microsoft has adopted XML in all of
its products. IBM in DB2, Oracle, and all of the major software vendors
have also adopted XML. The financial services industries are adopting
it as a data interchange standard with Open Financial Exchange (OFX).
Internet technologies now
provide the potential for extending electronic commerce to Government and
individuals. The new definition of electronic commerce will involve
electronic money and transactions accomplished entirely through computer
storefronts, with little or no human involvement in the processing of the
transaction. Internet based applications are few, but emerging at
an accelerated rate. Today, the OSC and many of the State agencies
are pursuing numerous internet based initiatives such as electronic funds
transfer, electronic payments, electronic malls, electronic catalogs, and
various other electronic business opportunities.