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 3 

Who has ownership of the extranet? Functions with an interest in an extranet include 

IT (technical infrastructure), Finance (setting payments and exchanging purchase orders 

and invoices), Marketing (providing marketing materials and sales data to distributors 

or providing services to customers) and Operations Management (exchanging informa-

tion about inventory). Clearly the needs of these different parties must be resolved and 

management controls established.

 4 

What are the levels of service quality? Since an extranet will become a vital part of an 

organisation’s operating process, a problem with the speed or availability of the extranet 

could cause loss of a lot of money; it is arguably more important than the  public-  facing 

Internet site.

  5 

Is the quality of the information adequate? The most important attributes of infor-

mation quality are that it is up to date and accurate. Vlosky et al. (2000) point out the 

importance of liability if information is inaccurate or the extranet crashes.

It will be seen in Chapter 6 that extranets are used extensively to support supply chain 

management as resources are ordered from suppliers and transformed into products and 

services delivered to customers. At Marshall Industries, for example, when a new customer 

order is received across the extranet it automatically triggers a scheduling order for the ware-

house (transferred by intranet), an order acknowledgement for the customer and a shipping 

status when the order is shipped (Mougayer, 1998). To enable different applications on the 

intranet to communicate, 

middleware

 is used by systems integrators to create links between 

organisational applications or between different members of a supply chain. For example, 

within a supply chain management system, middleware will translate requests from external 

Middleware

Software used to facilitate 

communications between 

business applications, 

including data transfer 

and control.

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Part 1  Introduction

systems such as a sales order so they are understood by internal systems (relevant fields are 

updated in the database) and then it will trigger follow-up events to fulfil the order.

Middleware is now also referred to as