The Ecology of E-Business

Biological and ecological metaphors and analogies have been the source of inspiration for many investigations, models and achievements in computing and business. Primarily, biological metaphors have inspired computer scientists and engineers in numerous disciplines, while ecological metaphors have become suggestive to many business models, processes, and formulation of strategies. Recently, there is a fast growing trend towards ecological approaches to business formulating its systems as business ecosystems and/or Internet ecosystems. Our work exploits the same view of business/Internet as an ecosystem. However, there is one basic difference between our formulation and others. In our view of the business and the Internet as ecosystems, we recognize that the business/Internet ecosystem supporting software is a logical part of a software continuum from bits (at low-level, as primitive building blocks) to Internet ecosystems (at high-level) much like the natural continuum from particles to ecosystems, hence the concept of ecology of software. In the software continuum that supports the ecology of software, e-business software application systems are considered as analogous to living organisms, the main level of organization of the natural continuum. In this paper, we argue that the ecology of software is the key to the notion of ecology of e-business which is considered as a derivative of the notion of ecology of business much discussed in the literature recently. We also argue that the ecology of software substantiating the software automation within the ecology of e-business fits well within the framework of the general system theory, at an implementable level of details. Our investigation focuses on specific concept development, architecture and implementation which center initially around three main areas: the birth of genomic programming for the creation of software species, architecture for robustness in automation and intelligence, and architecture for high-level (symbolic) – low-level (numeric) integration. Our contribution from this novel view consists of (1) a nature-based and nurture-driven model for guiding the development of autonomous and intelligent e-business software automation, and (2) a formulation of potential applications servicing the digital economy. These applications include but not limited to autonomous and intelligent e-business software, Internet application interoperability, businessIT integration, e-crisis management, and systemic capabilities such as fully-connectedness, selforganization, self-management and/or emergence.