Dr. Ecommerce

That's not an easy question. My colleague Paul Timmers was kind enough to provide an answer. (By the way, if you want a good background article about electronic commerce, I recommend Paul's article, "Electronic Commerce - An Introduction" at http://www.ispo.cec.be/ecommerce/answers/introduction.html):

The answer: You are in danger of entering into a fundamentalist discussion about what e-commerce is. We always avoid this discussion as it gets us nowhere (except when we need to measure e-commerce, then definitions are important). So we decided, in 1996, that we would use the non-definition: 'electronic commerce is about doing business electronically'. Hold your breath: this is now used in many policy papers all over the world... With this non-definition, there is no doubt that EDI was an early form of e-commerce. It was business-to-business AND application-to-application, so it had none of the interactivity that you see in today's e-commerce. The relatively smooth migration from EDI to Web/EDI as is happening today is another indicator that EDI is electronic commerce. Even more interesting, there is a lot of reinventing of the wheel in today's e-commerce. Many of the legal and security issues that are at the centre of attention in global policy discussions were already explored in EDI-days.

Now for another one: does e-commerce also encompass electronic work collaboration such as collaborative design and engineering? Again, in our policy papers we have explicitly mentioned that as part of e-commerce. The reason is that many of the same issues come up in such commercial collaboration as they come up in the trading forms of e-commerce (e.g. IPR [intellectual property rights], security, transaction handling, catalogue access, etc). Interestingly, collaborative work has old roots in workflow, probably as old as EDI.

Let's just conclude with a quote from John F Kennedy: "a success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan." E-commerce has many fathers...