Corporate Information Factory

CHAPTER 3

The External World Component

The alpha and the omega of the corporate information factory is the external world in which business is transacted. Without an external world of commerce, there would be no corporate information factory. So, let’s take a quick look at this component that feeds the fuel and consumes the information produced by the CIF.

It is easy to focus on the technology and other aspects of the corporate information factory and forget the external world because the external world is full of normal occurrences and normal events. The very ordinary nature of the external world makes us take it for granted.

But the external world is where business and commerce takes place. In a sense, the corporate information factory is merely an adjunct to the external world. Stated differently, the external world would exist and commerce would go on without the corporate information factory. However, the corporate information factory could not exist without the external world’s transaction producers and information consumers.

Transaction Producers

One of the focuses of the external world, at least insofar as the CIF is concerned, is to generate business transactions. A brief taxonomy of the important characteristics of the transactions that occur in the external world follows.

A Taxonomy of Transactions

   Is the transaction direct or indirect?

   A direct transaction might ...