The concept of communities is as old as civilisation, covering political, economic and geographic organisation. This decade has seen the introduction of electronic or virtual communities, facilitated by the Internet, whereby members communicate and exchange ideas regardless of geographic or other limitations. Gary de Menezes, electronic business manager at Ariel Technologies company Infovan, extrapolates. At the same time that economic communities are growing in strength (such as the European Union and the emergence of a southern African trade community), the concept of Electronic Business is gaining momentum. The creation of virtual economic communities can be seen as almost inevitable. With security a major concern among traders, financial organisations and end users, large scale Internet-based commerce is still on the horizon. However, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), secure private networks built for corporations, allow the creation of protected environments in which Electronic Business can prosper. These secure virtual networks allow for trading partners and customers to conduct secure Electronic Business. The introduction of IT into business has resulted in considerable savings in costs, resources and time by using Electronic Business technologies such as EDI, Web-based solutions, e-mail, etc. Creating a virtual EC community extends those benefits to customers and suppliers, resulting in enormous productivity gains. Such communities usually take the form of joint ventures, spreading the start-up cost s among the participants, reducing risk and maximising returns. The secure base of participants can ensure economies of scale and other shared benefits using the Internet medium such as web marketing, internal messaging and conferencing. Consider the motor industry, where many trading partners interact to provide both the product and ongoing maintenance. A manufacturer deals with multiple suppliers, divisions, resellers and service centres, creating a value chain of enormous complexity with all administration handled manually. Such complexity invariably introduces failure, whether due to human error, postage strikes or any other break in the chain. The introduction of IT into the chain, and the construction of an Electronic Business community, allows all the parties involved to communicate quickly, efficiently, reliably and securely. Costly time delays can be virtually cut out entirely, and inventory and stock management can be automated. The overall savings are potentially huge, and the boost in service levels equally impressive. With integration technology widely available, a transition from legacy systems can be performed gradually, with no loss of investment. Many widespread organisations resist the formation of Electronic Business communities for fear of losing the value of the big iron, but in fact the mainframe can be tightly integrated into the Web structure. Thus, no radical changes in business methods need to be undertaken. Because the entire environment is sealed from the rest of the Internet, with perhaps only e-mail and on-line marketing being transferred to and from the greater `net', there is no risk of a lack of interoperability between database systems, or conflict of protocols, and no risk (assuming the correct measures are taken) or security breaches. An advantage of Virtual Electronic Business Communities is that transition from legacy systems can be implemented slowly and progressively, and the Big Bang approach can be avoided. This allows businesses to focus on and upgrade processes and procedures, an important point when implementing technology into a legacy manual process
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