Objectives of knowledge management

1 
Business transaction. A single business transaction between two partners, such as plac-
ing an order or shipping an order.
 2 
Binary collaboration. A sequence of these business transactions, performed between 
two partners, each performing one role.
3 
 Multi- party collaboration. A series of binary collaborations composed of a collection of 
business partners.
One application developed using ebXML enables different accounting packages to com-
municate with online order processing systems. This new standard has been recognised by 
85% of the accounting industry, the World Wide Web Consortium and the United Nations. 
Over 120 national and international accounting software vendors have confirmed that they 
are developing interfaces. Exchequer Software Ltd (www.exchequer.com) is the first com-
pany to embed this new technology in its products, which means it receives orders via email 
directly into its own accounting system. This has resulted in a reduction of 30% in processing 
costs and a sales increase of 40%. The digital business module of the accounting software can 
be used to provide a remotely hosted e-commerce shopping cart system with regular updates 
of stock details, pricing matrices, account information and transactional data, such as out-
standing orders and invoices.
Governments are also using XML to standardise data transfer between departments.