| The research, development, and use of software agent technology is by no means a recent phenomenon. The concepts of software agent technology can be traced back to the early days of research into the broad field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) in the 1970s; indeed, to Carl Hewittis concurrent Actor model (Hewitt, 1977). In this model, Hewitt proposed the concept of a self-contained, interactive and concurrently-executing object which he termed "eactori". This object had some encapsulated internal state and could respond to messages from other similar objects: an actor "is a computational agent which has a mail address and a behavior. Actors communicate by message-passing and carry out their actions concurrently" (Hewitt, 1977, p. 131). Since the efforts of Hewitt, software agent technology has progressed and given birth to agent synonyms including knowbots (i.e. knowledge-based robots), softbots (software robot), taskbots (task-based robots), userbots, robots, personal agents, autonomous agents and personal assistants. Regardless of the name used to describe the entity, a software agent can be described as a software entity that displays autonomy, flexibility, and is situated within a specific environment. As such software agents can be fixed with respect to space and time, or can be mobile visiting many computing platforms and interacting with humans and other agents during their journey. Although software agent technology has progressed to a point where many users are not aware they are using software agent technology, the question of the required information technology (IT) infrastructure and information systems (IS) processes required to support software agent technology has yet to be fully explored. This agent support question is even more paramount for businesses involved with the on-demand E-Commerce business model; called the Utility business model by Rappa (Rappa, 2006). The Utility E-Commerce business model heavily relies on the public Internet for connectivity to its customers. As the number of software agents being launched increase so does the information being exchanged between agents, and between agents and human customers. This increase in information flow places a greater demand on the firm's IT infrastructure, especially the scalability and performance. Moreover, as the demands of IT increase it is anticipated that a subsequent impact will be experienced by the firm's IS processes. Without such IT infrastructure and IS process changes, the Utility E-Commerce business model may fail due to unmanageable demands by software agents. This research efforts attempts to qualify the extent of the impact software agent technology may have on IT and IS within companies using Rappa's Utility E-Commerce business model. |
