This paper presents and discusses a number of criteria for the design and implementation of electronic market servers, It first briefly reviews a number of electronic markets currently operational over the internet then offers some ideas on the types of new markets that may become successful. It then presents the design criteria for market servers, necessary to support these virtual markets. Finally, it introduces the ECMarket server, an experimental server under development at Elecomm Corporation. This work emanates from the research conducted at McGill University and Euridis at Erasmus Universiteit during 1992 to 1995.

User Information Satisfaction (UIS) remains one of the most important constructs in Information Systems research. This paper investigates the application of them UIS instrument across a number of key variables including respondent characteristics. Several findings emerge from a survey of 379 IS and non-IS managers: First, the UIS factors are stable and generalizable. Second, the level of satisfaction varies quite substantially when compared to prior UIS reports, although the IS product satisfaction dominates. Third, IS managers, not surprisingly, evaluate their systems significantly higher than non-IS managers, indicating the importance of stakeholders in evaluating Information Systems success. Finally, respondents evaluate their internal systems differently than their inter-organizational systems, indicating that in the IS evaluation process system type must be considered as a moderating variable.

Organizations engaging in electronic commerce typically are faced with defining detailed bilateral agreements between business partners. This implies that set-up costs for new electronic linkages can be quite high. There is a growing need to model and simulate this form of interorganizational interaction to lower these costs. The research presented contributes to this problem in two ways by: stipulating requirements on representation languages to be used for modelling trade procedures; and presenting a common graph-based representation language, Documentary Petri Nets, which satisfies these requirements. The practical implementation of Documentary Petri Net models is illustrated using a modelling environment, Case/Open-edi, a tool that may be used for the design and analysis of trade procedures. A simplified documentary credit procedure is used to give an example of such a Documentary Petri Net model. Finally, conclusions and directions for research are given

As informational aspects of international trade become more important, the strategic positions of ocean port communities become increasingly dependent on the quality and availability of telecommunication and processing infrastructures. This paper develops two frameworks to assess the level and nature of electronic trade integration within the context of a port community enterprise model. Port communities throughout the world are applying electronic data interchange (EDI) to trade functions because it enables open communications among many partners, provides acceptably quick communications for relatively low cost, and offers the prospect of significant savings in time and cost through reduced data capture volume and error-rates. EDI enables not only internal efficiencies but also the creation of new trade services. The first framework specifies the information systems and technology needed to enable EDI in international trade. The framework comprises two levels of infrastructure: communications and documentary; both supporting a third superstructure of business processes. Port communities are evolving from providing not only goods-handling facilities but offering advanced data-handling and processing systems as well. As competition between ports increases, information systems become key elements in their strategic positions. A second framework provides the structure for understanding physical and informational strategies of ports and port communities, and to examine their importance. Port communities may follow several models of infrastructure integration in moving towards their strategic objectives. However, realizing this potential requires research to determine the specific configurations that will fit into each trade environment. The contributions of this research to governments and corporations are primarily to provide models of successful application of EDI to international trade, and insight into technology transfer and diffusion, corporate competitiveness and policy formulation.

Management of the software development process requires a thorough understanding of the environment in which development takes place. Ability to estimate, plan, and manage resource consumption is limited by the central problem of determining the size of system specifications. To address this issue, a general strategy for measurement and evaluation of system development environments needs to be established. This article presents a research model that will help managers and researchers understand and establish the linkages between units of systems requirements specification, design, and source code. Initial validation of the model was performed by reverse engineering systems written in a fourth generation language from source code to design metrics. Results indicate that the model may provide reliable measures of system size in terms of both design metrics and lines of code.

A model has been developed that estimates information system requirements size. The estimating model may be applied relatively early in the systems development life cycle. The model captures system statics with the entity-relationship data model and system dynamics by measuring events at the system boundary. Results on pilot data indicate the model may provide a reliable predictor of system size in terms of lines of code, holding personnel experience and technology constant in a 4GL development environment.