Development of an Information Technology Infrastructure for Extended Enterprise

An extended enterprise is formed in the Globeman 21 project of the international Intelligence Manufacturing Systems Initiative to investigate the problems involved in the information access and control within the extended enterprise. Since the relationship of the companies in the extended enterprise is loosely associative, that is, there is no formal legal binding mechanism to explicitly state the obligations of the partners, the information infrastructure must also reflect the openness that is required to support it. This paper discusses the development of such an Information Infrastructure and some of the work done in ascertaining the usability of the technologies adopted. Specifically, we discuss various policies and software structures, and evaluate the use of WWW versus Lotus Notes in such an infrastructure.