Collaborative Working in an ISP Environment

Abstract

The way of life has changed with the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) in every one’s day to day activities and the business. As ICT technologies are constantly evolving, many people attribute the success of enterprises to the ways they deploy and take advantage of new technologies, not only to make their operations more efficient but most importantly to refine and adopt new effective and adaptive business models. Since the advent of the Internet and the very first Internet service providers (ISP) in operation, the traditional ISP market has been in constant evolution due to the gradual globalisation and commoditisation of ISP services. Deregulation and ICT policies have fostered competition (e.g., unbundling of the local loop and so forth) as well. The Internet is as an important channel of interaction inside and/or outside enterprises. The essence of the Internet is conducting business and running of business processes over data communication networks based on nonproprietary standards (Porter, 2001). The World Wide Web as a portal represents a major electronic business (e-business) platform accessed through communication channels provisioned by network and service providers (such as ISDN, DSL, WLAN, UMTS, etc.). There are many challenging aspects of the e-Business that must be considered for a sustainable business of an ISP (Petrie et al., 2004).