Abstract :
It has taken 20 years for EDI to begin to become an accepted way of doing business. Change will not remain at this leisurely pace-the forces identified in the paper will lead to a explosive growth in the number of users, use and new technology. I-EDI will be a very significant factor in the development of information technology but not the only one. It is however, the natural successor to batch EDI and will provide a natural transition path to real-time, interactive trading. The first users of i-EDI will be companies who are already using a form of interactive trading but, once its use has been proved, it will rapidly be picked up by companies who previously had not even realised that EDI could solve particular business problems
