Objectives of knowledge management

 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.
M03_CHAF6542_06_SE_C03.indd 111
7/22/14 1:37 AM

---

112
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