Was the Internet the Only Option? Which Way Should Business and Information Systems Engineering Go?

In global competition, the Internet turned out to be the single and hegemonial infrastructure for communication. It has become the “nervous system” of today’s networked economy. While the first phase provided communication services, like e-mail, the WWW has established an interactive platform to allow easy access to advanced services. Now, in its “third” or cooperative phase, the Internet will finally lead to a ubiquitous informatization where business processes and applications become interleaved beyond the boundaries of enterprises. For this phase, many analogies to the emergence of the Internet can be observed.