Introduction
Thousands of years ago, people began to produce goods for reasons other than personal use. Those skilled at making spears traded them with others who expertly wove fishing nets. Those skilled at building plows traded them for food with others who used the plows to farm.

Over time, trade became more formalized and structured, evolving from one-to-one trading to one-to-many selling through stalls at a market, especially after the use of currency was developed. Then, many-to-one selling took hold as individuals who made different goods all sold them to a single trader, who made this variety of products available in one location.

From caravans that plied the trade routes of the Orient to dry-goods stores and later department stores for consumers, and to distributors of industrial or office products for businesses, trade has grown in volume and complexity. Especially during the 20th century, that ever-increasing complexity led to specialization of skills, rigidity, and increasingly "engineered" business processes.

Today, e-business technology, sophisticated corporate databases, and decision-support tools together make it possible to create virtual marketplaces that are the electronic equivalent of an old-fashioned market square, and digital workplaces that are the equivalent of an artisan's work place.
 
E-Business Marketplaces
E-business marketplaces are designed to increase transaction efficiency for participants and optimize the network of businesses rather than a single business.

Marketplaces are either vertical or horizontal in nature.  Vertical marketplaces are designed to resolve industry-specific supply-chain inefficiencies. In a vertical marketplace, transactions can occur among industry players from anywhere on the industry's value chain. 

Horizontal marketplaces address a particular function or business process across many industries, such as procurement of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) materials, or office supplies, or even human resource services such as benefits management.

However they are structured, marketplaces provide a central platform for transaction automation, demand aggregation, improved market liquidity, and extended market reach.

Transaction-oriented marketplaces, as opposed to purely information-oriented digital communities, work best in industries or for processes where there is a fragmented universe of sellers and/or a fragmented universe of buyers.

For sellers, the digital marketplace affords them a low-cost way of marketing to a large universe of potential buyers. For buyers, the digital marketplace provides access to a large universe of potential sellers. 

Digital marketplaces that use "dynamic pricing" models, either an auction (forward or reverse) or a constant-pricing exchange, allow a buyer to determine a true "market price" for many items whose price was previously set through negotiation or tradition.

Enterprise Portals and Workplaces
The portal concept originated in the business-to-consumer (B2C) world, as a jumping off point for shopping excursions on the Web. Freeing consumers from the burden of finding specific Web sites, a portal provides a starting point, a home page that appears on the consumer's screen when he or she logs on to the Web.

Enterprise portals are the business-to-business (B2B) equivalent of consumer-oriented portals. But rather than offering access to consumer goods, services, and information, enterprise portals are designed to give each individual using them--executives, employers, suppliers, customers, or other business partners--a unique view of the company that provides the portal.

Enterprise portals consolidate informations from a host of inter-company information systems, applications that either reside on the company's servers or are brought into the company over the Internet from third-party application providers, and services that again either reside within the company or are brought in over the Web from providers.

Workplace technology extends the portal concept by allowing each user to personalize his or her home page on the enterprise portal. Using Workplace technology, an individual's home page within the company's enterprise portal becomes an analog to the workplace for the artisan of old.

The Workplace Advantage
This personalized Web-browser front end allows its user access to all the information, applications, and services necessary to complete the tasks he or she must accomplish in order to perform his or her work.

These information sources (such as industry news), software applications (such as spreadsheets and calendars), and services (such as travel arrangements) may reside on company servers, servers hosted for the company by a contracted provider, or be provided by a third party over the Web. The individual need not know the source of the information, application, or service, or how technically it arrives on the screen.

As he or she would with an office, cubicle, or a mobile work station, each individual can customize this virtual workplace to organize information, applications, and services in a way that is most comfortable, and to include some specific desired material, so long as he or she is allowed access to it.

In addition to its ability to be personalized, a Workplace also differs from a typical enterprise portal in the way its business logic determines who has access to what information, applications, and services. The workplace is "roles based" rather than "job based." 

Instead of allowing an individual access based on a particular job category or job description, the Workplace's business logic allows access based on what roles each individual plays. Most individuals have more than one role, and some people have many.

Some roles are widely held, such as employee. For instance, every employee has access to benefits management applications and services.

Some roles are narrowly held. For example, only department heads are allowed access to the marketplace for purchasing supplies; others only have access to the requisition-creation application, which forwards the request to the department head.

Still other roles are temporary, such as project manager. An individual who works in materials handling but is managing a special project in the materials handling department can be given access for the duration of the assignment to the wealth of project management learning information and project-management applications. 

Few deny that technology is a major driver of change in business and society, yet technological change for many people is a fearsome thing. For many, it's easy to view technology as dehumanizing.

But in the world of the enterprise portal and the e-business Workplace, the human dimension is more important than ever before. In a world where each individual can personalize some of the dimensions of his or her workplace, and thus change the way he or she accomplishes work, companies can more economically bring about change, and workers can cease to fear change.

Enterprise portals and the e-business Workplace are helping to create a business world where machines do not constrain people, but rather support people in executing the tasks and activities that make up their work.

Enterprise portals and the e-business Workplace go beyond being simply an on-ramp to the Information highway. They allow people to pull from many sources and build a tool kit with which to more effectively work.

Tutorial

Begin the page-by-page E-Business Workplace Portal overview. To return to this page, simply click on the link provided in the overview.

You may also jump directly to the selected overview topics:

• From User of an ERP System to Master of an E-Business Workplace
• E-Business Workplace Enables Change Management
• Beyond the Browser
• ERP and E-Business Workplace Portal in Tandem
• Workplace Portals and ERP Offer Strategic Options
• Workplace Portal Implementation
• Enhancing Workflow Through Workplace Portals
• Operational Benefits of the Workplace Portal
• Strategic Benefits of the Workplace Portal
• Driving Business Value

GRANT NORRIS, B.S., M.B.A, is a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers' management consulting services practice. Based in the U.S., Mr. Norris has 17 years of experience designing and installing ERP and e-business systems for a variety of organizations in the telecommunications, transportation, defense, and energy industries. He has lectured on topics related to this experience at a number of software companies and universities. Mr. Norris's global perspective results from his having lived and worked in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. He is co-author of E-Business and ERP: Transforming the Enterprise and SAP: An Executives Comprehensive Guide.