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Advances in B2B e-Commerce and E-Supply Chain Management Guest Editors' Introduction

With the burst of the Internet bubble, it is now painfully clear that the Internet economy will not materialize overnight and that many of the bold B2B and Internetenabled supply chain management predictions of the mid-to-late nineties were premature. In many instances, early business models proved simplistic, required immature technologies and necessary standards were nonexistent. Despite these early setbacks and the disappearance of many e-marketplaces and other B2B players, the vision of an economy where interactions among companies are facilitated by the Internet remains just as compelling. The Internet continues to hold the promise of significant performance improvements. Emerging maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) e-procurement practices are just a harbinger of what lies ahead. The Internet will ultimately enable more agile business practices across a much broader range of contexts. It will help companies come together and form virtual organizations. It will enable teams of people spread across multiple enterprises to collaborate on the design, engineering, production, delivery, and maintenance of products and services. For this to happen, though, a number of key challenges still need to be addressed from developing flexible middleware, intelligent decision support functionality, and new layers of e-business standards to gaining a deeper understanding of how to effectively apply these technologies in different contexts. In this special issue, we present findings from research efforts aimed at addressing these and related challenges. Most of the articles were first presented at the International Conference in Electronic Commerce (ICEC 2000) that took place in Seoul, Korea, in August 2000. Since then, they have been updated and beefed up by their authors to reflect their most recent work.