TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 2 provides a high-level explanation of the technology and standards used in the business trip described in the previous chapter. Many services and supporting technologies came together in the business trip story. These include online repositories, customer relationship management, online calendar services, travel agencies, car rental, and more. We examine each of these in this chapter. As you read this chapter, note that it is relatively easy to swap out one service provider for another. This is because of standards related to data interchange. The result, as shown in this story, is that competition is related to either cost or innovation.
In this story, there is a tremendous amount of technology and data interchange going on behind the scene. Let s look at some of the information technology used. Figure 2.1 shows the ways in which the various services exchanged data in this story. The following sections of this chapter provide more information on the services and data interchange shown in this figure.
Remember that C. R. s organization decided it was important to keep track of all customer contacts. They did this by using an online repository [ 1]This repository is behind their firewall and is served by a cluster of application servers. Both the application servers and repository are also fault tolerant. This means that they are capable of being accessible virtually all the time even...
