Introduction: Advances in E-business engineering

E-business is more than just e-commerce. It is one of the most challenging areas for industry and research communities. E-business has evolved from business-to-business, business-to-customer, customer-to-business, customer-tocustomer, and business-to-government systems to the integrated and collaborative business services among various information systems and e-marketplaces. In this evolving process, integrated e-business systems and their related supporting platforms have to be rapidly designed and developed in order to meet different requirements. A variety of e-business engineering paradigms and technologies have been developed to tackle these challenges. There are many research issues needed to be addressed. These issues include heterogeneous services integration, disparate e-business functions collaboration, semantic level e-business messaging, etc. Today, not only large companies, but also medium or small-sized companies are learning that e-business is a required component of doing business. As a result, there is a growing demand for insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the design, implementation, and management of e-business systems. To respond to the market needs from both academic researchers and practitioners, and to communicate research results on e-business engineering, a number of related conferences organized by the IFIP TC8 WG8.9, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on E-Commerce, and IEEE SMC Society Technical Committee on Enterprise Information Systems have been held in the past years. Such conferences include IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering, IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (Confenis), IEEE SMC International Conference Special Session on Enterprise Information Systems, GCIS, and WCSE. These conferences plus workshops have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 12 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently. The purpose of this special issue is to report on the state-of-the-art of, and emerging trends in, research and practice in e-business engineering. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. In the paper by Academician Shoubo Xu of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a new concept of management is proposed. The author indicates that ‘‘to manage’’ means to lead, to plan, to organize and to control; and ‘‘to reason’’ means to understand the law of the development of objects being managed. This new concept is an integration of the two elements of ‘‘managing’’ and ‘‘reasoning’’. As such, management is to study the contradictory relationship between ‘‘managing’’ and ‘‘reasoning’’, and consider how such a relationship develops and changes. The paper discusses its broad applications including information industry such as e-business. Qian, Jin and Fang of the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in their paper entitled ‘‘Heuristic algorithms for effective broker deployment’’, proposes a model for the broker deployment problem, and presents two heuristic algorithms for the multi-object optimization of broker deployment. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. L. Li (&) Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA e-mail: lli@odu.edu