How far can we go?

Business laundry list No exceptions Imagining a new world order Real-life, real time

Many network executives and industry analysts clearly can see e-business' next milestone. Some call it the "real-time enterprise," a business structure that allows the automatic routing of information to the right person at the right time - instantaneously if required. Hand in hand with that, they foresee how the network would become a commodity utility.

This would free up the network's creators and guardians to focus on solving far more difficult technical problems than the reliable transport, storage and access of data. One such problem is true collaboration. Despite rosy projections for adoption of real-time collaborative technologies, automating interactions among human beings is an enormous technical challenge, researchers say. Yet this technology will be critical for the real-time enterprise and beyond.

As for the shape of e-business infrastructure in that beyond, it remains anyone's guess - although pundits prophesize that this commoditized real-time network will lead us to amazing global possibilities. The most prescient technology navigators can see beyond even this, to a sci-fi future in which tiny, honeycomb-like independent organizations, glued together seamlessly by the network, compose the corporate world. Others contend the instantaneous data network will affect even more than that by influencing geopolitical interactions. But wherever the destination, lead us it will - and quickly, too. We have already started down the path.

Extended-enterprise forerunners are using real-time e-business functions now (see story, "Real life real time"). But bringing real-time to the mainstream requires mass adoption of a stable, open systems-based network. Some liken this to turning the network into a commodity-like service and focusing higher up the Open Systems Interconnection stack, says Robert Handler, vice president of enterprise planning and architecture strategies at Meta Group.

He notes that this process has begun: For instance, network people rarely concentrate on which network interface card is best, nor do they fret over routers and protocols. Rather, they now concern themselves with issues such as which application server is best, he says. Eventually open standards among applications will make the entire stack a non-issue, he adds.

Business laundry list

Business processes across partner networks also must be standardized before the real-time enterprise can take root, says Thomas Koulopoulos, president and co-founder of market research firm Delphi Group. "I may have all the networking I need to initiate a process, but no way to control [the transaction] once it leaves my business. I'm at the mercy of my partner's processes," he says. In other words, no matter how many monitoring or workflow triggers you've built into your application, if a partner prints the transaction record to paper for handling, then your ability to automate processes becomes irrelevant.