For those of us accustomed to living with the details of EDI on a daily basis, it's not much of a stretch to understand exactly why EDI makes sense. Imagine handling those hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of transactions if they were email messages... or heaven forbid... paper! But not everyone sees just how much more efficient digital messaging is, particularly if they have never had to deal with the details of an organization's business transactions. What would you do if your senior management asked you to justify the sometimes significant expenses that go to keep your EDI infrastructure running? One of your peers wants your ideas.

This issue of eC-BP.org's newsletter marks the launch of our new series, "On The Line." In this series, we will be talking with the people who make EDI systems run, and keep them running. Each interview is presented as a standard set of questions, but each person has the opportunity to answer the questions and expand on the topic. This format is similar to our "From the Top" series, interviews with executive management of EDI software and services providers.

EDI staff members are invited to review the questions and send in their own responses for publication.

The holiday shopping season of 2006 has left us with a clear view that the online world of shopping is alive and growing. Of course, the general news media concentrates on the numbers turned in through the retail channel, with the likes of Amazon.com and eBay.com reporting annual increases that show the world is putting at least equal trust in buying online as through physical locations. But what is not so apparent to the online shoppers is the infrastructure behind the final delivery of their orders.