Introduction: Advances in e-business engineering and management

The term ‘‘e-business’’ was coined by IBM in 1990s, and defined as business activities and processes assisted by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In e-commerce sector, according to a recent study, ‘‘Total e-commerce retail sale for 2014 in the US are estimated at $304.9 billion, marking a 15.4 % increase from 2013 sales. In the same time, total retail sales increased just 3.8 %. While e-commerce accounted for 6.5 % of total retail sales in 2014 (5.8 % in 2013), this number is on pace to increase at 14 % compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and will bring its share of the retail market to nearly 9 % by 2017. Not included in these calculations are the billions spent on travel booked online, including airfare, hotels, car rental and travel packages. According to comScore, US e-commerce travel sales were more than $100 billion in 2012, marking a 9 % increase from the previous year’’ [18]. Especially in the new world of IoT, cloud computing and big data science, data, processes, and devices are all converging to reshape how day-to-day business is done. E-business has rapidly evolved, is one of the most exciting and challenging research areas [11, 25, 26]. In such rapid development, new e-business engineering methods and techniques as well as e-business engineering management methods have been developed and applied [2, 5, 10, 13, 15–17, 23, 24]. To respond to the needs from both academic researchers and practitioners for communicating research results on e-business engineering methods and techniques, conference series organized by the IFIP, IEEE and other major research institutions have been developed. These conferences have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 7 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently, focusing on e-business engineering management. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to at least two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. Business transactions between different enterprises are more and more executed by a flow of well-defined electronic business documents [22]. However, the structures of these documents may significantly differ depending on industries and regions/areas/countries in which the corresponding inter-organizational business processes are executed [3, 4, 19]. In the paper by Novakovic and Huemer, a novel approach is introduced to apply the contextual knowledge for (semi-) automatically generating semantically interoperable data building blocks, so-called Core Components, comprised by electronic business documents. These documents conform to the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) which is proposed by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) [14]. With the development of global economic integration, technology standards have become increasingly important for business, industries, and e-business [21]. The paper entitled ‘‘Interaction between technology standardization and technology development: a coupling effect study’’ aims to extend the study about the interaction between technology standardization and technology development. & Li Da Xu lxu@odu.edu