Modern business networks tend to be highly distributed inter-organizational entities spanning country boundaries composed of business partners who have limited insights into the overall network and who are only focused on optimizing their own small part of the value chain. Current ICT services generally support this limited network focus, and thus provide only basic support for inter-organizational data and process integration. This means that complex inter-organizational collaboration activities today must be accomplished through manual efforts.
Technology advancements are also placing increasing strains on existing ICT systems. New technologies for gathering data on field activities, such as new sensor technologies, scanners, and RFID, are creating data collection, distribution and management problems for existing Internet technology. Sharing of these data is also problematic as the requirements for privacy and security of these types of data are poorly supported by existing Internet services.
The lack of robust inter-organizational integration and collaboration systems hampers business efficiency and optimization for all parties involved in the planning and execution of multi-organization value chain activities: customer requirements for end-to-end tracking and tracing must be satisfied through combinations of human inputs and interventions, heterogeneous information from incompatible ICT systems create barriers to interoperability between network partner systems, and the end-to-end coordination of operational planning and execution activities requires extensive manual effort making network operations costly, non-transparent, error-prone, inefficient and environmentally non-sustainable.