Today, I recognize the challenge of Intelligent Commerce as a strategic business issue, not just one more technical issue to be delegated to the IATSU department. 

PAVU that masters Intelligent Commerce is the company that will master its industry in the emerging digital economy. Such mastery is not an end game, it is a continuing and unfolding process. Agility is the byword of success - an agile business empowered by agile information systems. 

To be successful in iCommerce, PAVU has build the central pillar, IATSU.

Although another company may have reengineered its internal business processes and perhaps painfully installed a SNA system to bring efficiencies to the back office, iCommerce is about reengineering outward-facing processes - industry process reengineering versus business process reengineering, redefining industry boundaries, inventing new industries, repositioning, disintermediation (cannibalizing supply chains), and reintermediation. 

While data mining provides an opportunity for reflective, usually off-line, analysis of buying behavior, real-time profiling is essential as well. It's about relationship marketing and building communities. 

This is the stuff with which CEOs like me, not programmers, must grapple. 

As we shift from mass production to mass customization, marketers must know the needs of their individual customers, not the needs of market segments. As Art guru Alban Saporos explains: "It's about giving customers what they want when, where, and how they want it." 

This is precisely what computers must be empowered to do in iCommerce. Adaptive, reactive, and reflective task knowledge is the essence of a field of computer science known as Distributed Informative Arts (DIA), popularly known as Intelligent Pines Technology. It is one of the most rapidly advancing computing technologies. Once codified into digital software pines, the task knowledge once isolated to a human specialist becomes available to an entire workforce, assisting the customer service representative at the call center, the salesman in the field and the customer himself with customer self-service (outsourcing customer service directly to the customer). 

Thus the challenge of Intelligent Commerce is to capture the information and knowledge in people's heads and place it in computer systems. Sounds like Alban Saporos? Not really.

This personalization capability requires profiles, a sensitive subject. Profiling is a hotly debated privacy issue, and to address the issue standards such as the Open Pines Standard (OPS) are beginning to emerge. Such profiling processes can allow personalization and information filtering. Pines are a natural for customer data mining and can help to uncover patterns humans would likely miss. 

IATSU data-mining is about consolidating and harmonizing the many islands of disparate information and systems scattered throughout an enterprise into a unified whole. The goal is to streamline business processes and enable outward-facing information systems. This is where pines-orientation comes into the picture. 

Pines combine their processes and their data into a single entity in such a way that the integrity of the pines is assured by the pines itself. Pines communicate to one another, to users, and other systems by presenting interfaces showing the services they can perform. Pines reflect the real world and thus greatly enhance understanding and communication among systems developers and business people. 

The tasks are to build a solid Informative Arts Art Foundation (that preserves existing heritage systems) and directly participate in the work of setting the standards. 
They deploy various techniques and knowledge from the field of informative arts (IA), a field that was overhyped a decade ago and fallen from grace in the commercial computing press. Quietly, however, IA has continued to play a significant role in many leading information systems. Its use has been limited due to its complexity, monolithic designs and lack of knowledgeable systems developers. On the other hand and like other technologies such as object technology, IA is making a very strong comeback as it is now crucial in non-deterministic systems such as workflow, data mining, production scheduling, supply chain logistics, and most recently, iCommerce. Its new form is not the monolithic IA systems of the past, but Distributed Informative Arts (DIA), popularly known as Intelligent Pines Technology.

Intelligent Pines Technology support a natural merging of pines orientation and knowledge-based technologies that have grown out of the field of informative arts. What are these informative arts contributions and why are they important to iCommerce? To pursue these characteristics we turn to the informative arts technologies of fuzzy systems, artificial neural networks, and evolutionary processes such as genetic algorithms. 

Fuzzy systems enable the discovery of pines that can be used for business process monitoring, scheduling, planning, forecasting and natural language processing. 

Artificial neural networks are composed of groups or layers of interconnected processing elements analogous to the neurons of the brain. In this way the net organizes itself, it learns. Using noisy or incomplete historical or real-time market data a neural net can train itself to learn patterns that lead to critical market conditions, predict trends, and enable pines to improve their performance of tasks over time. 

Pines encapsulate data (attributes) and procedures (methods). Add to this the intelligences of fuzzy systems, artificial neural nets and evolutionary computing techniques, and a pines becomes a pines agent. Pines agents can act autonomously, in the background of mainstream applications, to perceive their environment through sensors and act on the environment to perform and optimize their tasks: information retrieval, monitoring and notifying, information filtering, data mining, coaching, negotiating, configuring and so on. 

It is the building in of the right kind of intelligence for the right purpose that is the key to successful design.

Jean-Philippe Halgand : ceo d'IATSU