E-commerce: Inside information (transcript), 02/28/00

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

What is the biggest technology related problem you've had to date in implementing e-commerce?

Grim: Our challenges were making sure we kept in line with the very simple to very complex requirements we would need to meet for our customers, which span from companies with 100 employees to the largest global multinationals in the world, and projecting into the future the emerging technology platforms and solution sets [they would require].

Ragunas: In our case, the real challenge was picking the right partners to work with from a technology perspective. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to go through and figure out which ones are going to best meet our current needs and which are going to be strong in the future so they can continue to grow with our business.

Any tips for how you do that?

Ragunas: We subscribe to what we call a market forces theory, which is to look at who seems to have momentum in the marketplace, and also who does the best job at subscribing to emerging standards that we'll be carrying forward. We also rely on internal folks who go out and review [products] in advance of our needs, so that we're well-positioned to make decisions quickly when the time comes. And we rely on IT advisory firms in this space because they have a very broad view into who the right players are.

Grim: It comes down to setting out the criteria you want to meet up-front then constantly going back to that criteria, which should be a combination of strategic criteria, plain old technology and customer-driven criteria.

The other thing is, as you go through the evaluation of partners, you need to stay nimble and flexible and ready to change on a dime, because there may be an announcement from a secondary partner that will make you change your thinking.

Quinn: In the healthcare industry the biggest technical barrier is lack of standards -- standards that cover not just the ability to move information, but the meaning of the information. The clinical vocabulary is massive, hundreds of thousands of terms, and there is no good set of standards defining what those terms mean and how they're to be enunciated. For example, some physicians say they want a CBC test, others call it a complete blood count test, and others call it a personal blood panel, and so on.

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