An Analysis of E-Business Systems Impacts on the Business Domain

In e-business systems, the business environment and processes not only drive the identification of system needs, but also are in turn fundamentally changed by the introduction or evolution of a system. This means that an e-business system that is under development will be highly volatile with a complex set of impacts on the various domain characteristics (and conversely, the changes in the domain impact on the nature of the desired system). We report on a detailed analysis of the literature related to these impacts. From this analysis we show how different facets of the domain of a system are impacted in different ways. As the scale and immediacy of these impacts increase we need to become more predictive of these impacts in taking them into account during the development. Our analysis will provide organisations with the basis for moving towards this increased level of predictiveness