This unit is a recoding from BUS4710 (to be disestablished) to BUS5710. Prerequisite BUS9520 Business Systems A or equivalent added. Prohibition BUS4710 added.The previous revision for BUS4710 was a proposal to add summer semester to the semester offerings and to impose a quota of 60 students on summer semester enrolments.In the wake of Y2K a majority of IT managers have cited Business to Business (B2B) e-Commerce as their next major project. Explosive growth and a corresponding skill vacuum in this area are expected to continue throughout the first decade of the 21st century. In a broader context B2B is expected to bring fundamental, far reaching changes to existing business processes and culture as company IT systems begin to overlap in an attempt to form integrated, inter company supply chains. All graduates hoping to join the Business IT industry will need to understand and appreciate this new, inter-company transparency and its effects.The initial task faced by many companies is to interconnect, with varying degrees of transparency, their back office ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning systems) via e-commerce marketplace hubs. Order matching (e-Procurement) has emerged as the easiest and most cost effective B2B transaction. Deeper, more complex, inter-company B2B linkages are already being developed and implemented. Although still early days, several products have emerged as B2B winners. Existing ERPs will obviously play a major role. The most dominant of these systems (highest head count) in Australia and the rest of the world is SAP R3.SAP has recently formed an alliance with one of the leaders in B2B software platforms (viz. Commerce One). Another leader in the B2B software marketplace (viz. Ariba) has already developed and implemented linkages between its own software and SAP R3. Oracle is developing its own B2BERP platforms. Specific B2B skill sets based around the integration of leading B2B software platforms and ERPs will enhance graduate employment prospects and service the Business IT industry by mitigating the expected B2B skill vacuum. All very well, but these last two paras don't seem to have much to do with reasons for introduction. Do you need to say something about the need to teach these topics