Business network technology
On our tour through the concepts of a business network, we've seen the central importance of multi-party transactions, which describe how assets are exchanged between the network's participants. This means that a significant amount of technology is already deployed to implement them.
If you've worked in IT for a while, you've probably heard of the terms business-to-business (B2B) and electronic data interchange (EDI). They describe the idea and technology of how businesses exchange information with each other. You might additionally have experience of related protocols such as AS1, AS2, AS3, and AS4. These define standard mechanisms about how to exchange business data between two organizations. Don't worry if you haven't heard of these terms—the key takeaway is that business networks exist today in a very real sense and have a lot of technology applied to them.
What does it mean to implement a business network...
