There is quite a lot being written and said these days about the Internet and Electronic Commerce. What's surprising about this is that no one ever mentions Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in these discussions, while just about all the large and medium-sized companies have been doing business with each other electronically for years via EDI. It seems as though the Internet world has no idea what EDI is and what it can mean for Electronic Commerce. At the same time, largely due to all the excitement around the Internet, companies who have already started with EDI are becoming unsure whether the investments of the past years were really justified.
In nearly all the material published about the Information Superhighway, the focus is exclusively on how consumers will sooner or later be able to obtain every possible product and service electronically without having to leave home. One never hears of the trouble that companies will have to go through to deliver them. Speculation runs wild over how much companies will have to invest in order to make it technically possible for consumers to take advantage of these services, but no one says anything about how companies will have to relate with one another in order to operate efficiently on the "highway". Even Microsoft's Bill Gates, in his book The Road Ahead, goes on for page after page about the science fiction-like possibilities that will be available to consumers once the Highway is here. However he describes EDI (which according to him stands for Electronic Document Interchange) in only 10 lines as something "unsuitable for ad hoc communications, although many companies are working to combine the benefits of EDI and e-mail into a single system." This declaration is typical of how the major players in the software market look at EDI.
The complete lack of understanding in the Internet world for the role that EDI can play in Electronic Commerce is a great danger for the companies which, at the end of the day, have to deliver the products and services. It is high time that the EDI organizations in the world let their voices be heard and make clear that EDI is actually the backbone of Electronic Commerce.
