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112 Erwin and Averweg
electronic forms;
• Shared databases - information stored in repositories is shared between
trading partners and is accessible to all parties. The sharing is primarily done
over extranets; and
• Supply chain management (SCM) - co-operation between an organization
and its suppliers and/or customers regarding demand forecasting, inventory
management and orders fulfillment can reduce inventories, speed shipments
and enable just-in-time manufacturing.
Better information leads to better decisions. Information from outside the
organization should be included in EIS (Chiusolo & Kleiner, 1995). Chiusolo and
Kleiner (1995) note the need for current and accurate information about the
organization and the world in general is common among all executives.
The global nature of e-commerce technology, its interactivity, resourcefulness
and rapid growth of supporting infrastructures (especially the Web) result in many
potential benefits to organizations (Turban et al., 2000) (e.g., expanding the
marketplace and reducing inventories). There are, however, limitations of ecommerce.
These can be grouped into technical and non-technical categories.
Some of the technical limitations of e-commerce for EIS are:
• Insufficient telecommunication bandwidth;
• Limited search facilities for filtering Web information;
• Lack of system , reliability, standards and some communication protocols;
• Continued evolution and rapid change of software development tools; and
• Integration difficulty between the Internet and e-commerce software and
some existing applications and databases.
FUTURE TRENDS
E-commerce could become a significant global economic element during the
twenty-first century (Clinton & Gore, 1997). The infrastructure for e-commerce is
networked computing which is emerging as the standard computing environment
in business, government and home (Turban et al., 2000). Networked computing
connects several computers and other electronic devices by telecommunications
networks. This facilitates users accessing information stored in several places and
to communicate and collaborate with others. This new breed of computing is helping
many organizations (private and public) not only to excel but also frequently to
survive. Since the technologies required for networked computing are often
immature, organizations are only beginning to develop systems that are large steps
toward achieving an ideal that can probably only be approximated
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