Lesson 1

According to Forrester Research, the e-commerce market in the Asia Pacific region is expected to grow from $1.5 trillion in 2019 to $2.5 trillion in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.3%. This growth is partly attributed to an increase in new buyers due to COVID-19, although consumer spending might be negatively impacted by economic slowdowns【5†source】. For the global e-commerce market, the projection is even more substantial. It is estimated to reach $18.81 trillion by 2029, up from $8.80 trillion in 2024, representing a CAGR of 15.80%. This forecast highlights significant advancements in technology and increasing consumer preference for convenient shopping solutions as major growth drivers【6†source】.

The rapid changes in the Internet make it difficult for any business to establish long-term e-business architecture. With this rapid expansion, it can be difficult to design a proper architecture to support the ever-expanding needs of e-businesses. In this module, you will learn how companies are using ebusiness architecture to conduct business. Namely, you will learn about e-Business relationships, e-Business models, and various means of delivering e-business.

Companies are leveraging "e-business architecture" to conduct business in several ways, primarily focusing on enhancing their agility, adaptability, and resilience at every level. This approach allows them to transform their enterprise by adopting service-oriented architecture, which is a key component of digital transformation. The use of e-business architecture enables companies to improve their business strategy by implementing agile and digital-focused practices. Moreover, e-business architecture is used to enhance business processes and strategies by mapping IT components, such as applications, data, or technology, to business capabilities. This provides a holistic view of the organization that can be used to streamline the IT landscape and improve transparency across all enterprise architecture layers. This transparency is crucial for decision-making and for aligning business and IT strategies, particularly during mergers and acquisitions or when rationalizing application portfolios. In addition, e-business architecture is used to model, analyze, and design electronic business operations. This involves understanding the drivers and use cases of conducting electronic business, exploring various models of electronic business, and developing the necessary software infrastructure and technological capabilities to support these models. This enables companies to effectively conduct business online, leveraging modern information technologies to deliver business capabilities over the internet.
In summary, companies use e-business architecture to improve their business operations, streamline their IT landscape, and adapt to the digital economy by implementing service-oriented architecture, enhancing business capabilities, and aligning their business and IT strategies.

An architects working group has developed several builds on the original work to enhance support by tools. This paper reflects these refinements and provides a set of standard business concepts and guidance as to how to use them to instantiate organized knowledge about specific enterprises. This set is a high-level semantic framework that has been developed over a considerable length of time. The concepts that are presented here have been abstracted from experience with many specific enterprise business models, various generic industry reference models, and several years of experience in organizing business terminology for specific businesses. A set of generic concepts and their interrelationships organize business information content in terms of requirements on the business, the boundary of the business, and the business as a system for delivery of value. Methods are introduced to explore variations on the basic business concept patterns. These concepts are positioned to describe IT systems that support the business, and they are used to manage the work of IT system development and deployment.

A complete architectural specification of an information technology (IT) system includes information about how it is partitioned and how the parts are interrelated. It also contains information about what it should do and the purpose it must serve in the business. This module provides a set of business concepts that partition the world of business meaning. It discusses the purpose of such an architectural view of business and ways in which it can be used. Business today is interlinked with information system technology. From the smallest home office business supported by a shrink-wrap^[1] business suite, to the multinational corporation with multiple monolithic legacy applications, it is impossible to be in business today without confronting the issues of supporting the business with software. Sn interlocking semantic framework is necessary in order to understand and create the software solutions for the enterprise of today and the future and focuses on the business concepts that underlie information technology (IT) systems.

[1] shrink-wrap: to wrap and seal (a book, a food product, etc.) in a flexible film of plastic that, when exposed to a heating process, shrinks to the contour of the merchandise.