| Electronic commerce is changing the way companies do business. One fundamental aspect that is frequently ignored is the interplay between the internal and external commerce. To provide support for this interplay, MIS organizations need to rethink the organization of technology in terms of brokerages, because the traditional notion of client/server computing is not sufficient to deal with the complexity of electronic commerce. Consequently, new computing forms have to be developed to process, filter and customize on-line documents. This research studies the design of brokerages from both the organizational and technological perspectives. In particular, it focuses on: (1) the development of an intermediary MIS brokerage as a profit center that will enable organizations to carry out value-added "knowledge-rich" transactions in the electronic marketplace; (2) the enterprise wide issues that people are concerned with and how to identify them; and (3) the technology requirements to build the MIS brokerage that is capable of supporting the pertinent corporate functionality. The success of the MIS brokerage will depend on its ability to digest and meet users' needs and, thus, to deliver value-added knowledge products that enhance the profitability of the company. The main objective of this work is to provide an infrastructure for MIS organizations as a central brokerage which serves not only as the intermediary between information and information users, but also as an integrating force that represents the convergence of business applications and computing technologies for the twenty-first century. |
