Ed, I don't think it's a "generation thing." I think it's a rational economic actor thing. Credit cards have successfully won a place alongside paper currency because of their significantly different risk-allocation features, not because they're cooler than or techi-er than dollar bills.
It seems to me that a large share of e-commerce adoptions take place when a sizable trading partner community, with a dominant hub player, is cajoled by the hub into process change, to obtain efficiencies that, while they may accrue to everyone, probably have the greatest benefit to the hub. In contrast, two isolated trading partners with working paper processes have little reason to fix what isn't broke. I think Gene Hockemeyer is correct that the real obstacle to widespread adoption is data harmonization, not technology. The value proposition for e-commerce is faster, cleaner, more efficient: not a ratio of trees to electrons consumed. Getting "dialtone" over GEIS, a Gentran box or an XML interpreter is increasingly trivial, compared to the business disruptions caused by improving back-end business practices to the extent necessary to reliably and validly populate all fields of relevant standard transaction sets. "EDI" that routinely stuffs key data into nonstandard fields, by bilateral agreement, circumvents that step, and in most cases probably is not achieving the magnitude of process improvement that would make it compelling. To me, the choice of X12/ASCII/XML/passenger pigeon/etc is small change, compared to the bigger question of whether businesses actually will choose to normalize their data. Regards Jamie Clark ~ James Bryce Clark ~ VP and General Counsel, McLure-Moynihan Inc. ~ 1 818 597 9475 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (www.mmiec.com) ~ Chair, ABA Business Law Subcommittee on Electronic Commerce ~ (www.abanet.org/buslaw/cyber/ecommerce/ecommerce.html) --- You are currently subscribed to xmledi-group as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
