The state policy "Industrialization Driven By Informatization" is spurring on the new wave of enterprise IT applications in China, becoming a cardinal task in Chinese IT community. For this reason, we take this column as a kernel part to made our every effort in collecting information on e-Enterprise as complete as possible without considering space limitation.
      The basic purpose of enterprise informatization is to improve the business performance and competitiveness in market. Thus, it should be stressed heavily on combination with business objectives. As a result, we leave the first place in the column to Business and IT Alignment, to avoid the order reversed from the beginning. Also, the necessity of business and technology consulting is recommended to avoid detours.

      The success of enterprise informatization always dependent upon the vision and commitment of enterprise's executives. Assignment of a new post CIO and listing IT planning into senior decision making are best practices and experiences observed from many enterprises. Thus, we open up a special section on CEO/CIO Should Know, to help them know why, what and how.
      Chinese enterprises start their IT applications rather late, with quite poor IT infrastructure compared with their counterparts in developed countries. However, such poverty and blankness in IT facilities has another favorable respect. That is, able to implement development cross generation and directly enter into e-Business era without any constraints from the legacy systems. Here the "e-Business" has a rather broad meaning, not just limited to e-commerce over Internet, but also including application of IT into all of enterprise business management.
      To help enterprises get an appropriate understanding, we set up a special section on e-Business, with additional introduction to Enterprise Infrastructure & Framework.
      Two mainstream technologies are specially recommended: one is Business Process Management, in which Supported by so-called e-Process, the enterprise can carry out Business Process Improvement (BPI) and Business Process Automation (BPA) based on the business process analysis, even Business Process Reengineering (BPR) for a revolutionary business transformation.
      The second one is the Web Services, a next-generation technology for enterprise application integration, by which the enterprise can readily provide sharing not only information, but also application services distributed over anywhere through Internet/Intranet. The technology is XML-based and has sharped a series of related Protocols & Standards, such as SOAP, UDDI, WSDL and WSFL etc, for which a detailed introduction is given in the column, including their Implementation, Transactional Web Services, and Links to Other Related Resources
      Establishing Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is a helpful mean for enterprise application integration (EAI). It facilitates users to access information and services requested and can provide a personal interface and service for efficiency. The section introduces related techniques and explains how to develop the EIP components: Portlets & Gadgets.
      To help enterprises implement component-based development, the column discusses Business Components & Objects, as well as reusable Patterns & Frameworks for enterprises
      For the content layer of Enterprise Applications, we have opened up a special space that enumerate many typical and sample enterprise applications for reference, such as: Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Knowledge Management (KM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Relationship Management (RM), Performance Management (PM), Product Data Management (PDM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and a special section on Advanced Manufacturing Technology to the project of Informatization Engineering for Manufacturing. For application development area, we have some sections on IT Strategic Planning, Enterprise Application Development Methodology, and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) & Business Process Integration (BPI)
      For helping enterprises to make a selection, we introduce New IT Service Models, discuss IT outsourcing via ASP, xSP, and BPO, and how to manage the outsourcing through SLA & SLM
      For this key column, we have collected and linked very comprehensive International IT Resource Web Sites, and hope this column will be very beneficial to the process of Chinese enterprise Informatization.