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Objective of Meeting
Summary
Outputs
Next Steps
Links

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Active Loss Prevention

Meeting Report

ALPINE Project

Cannes, France - Wednesday, October 16th 2002

Objective of Meeting

The Wednesday afternoon sessions were established to refine and agree the Terms of Reference for the three proposed ALPINE projects.  

Summary

The three proposed projects were discussed and the TOR were refined and agreed by all parties.

Outputs

ALPINE project meeting.

This meeting was to complete the work on the terms of reference for the first three projects of the ALPINJE project.  The meeting was attended by:

Martin Roe (Security Forum guest, independent consultant, ICX)
Jeremy Hilton (Viviale, ALPI)
John Mawhood (Tarlo Tyons, ALPI)
Scot Hansen (Open Group, EC coordinator)
Richard Sitruk (ETIS, ALPINE Partner)
Mikel Emaldi (ESI)
Estebaliz Delgado (ESI)
David Lounsbury (The Open Group, ALPI)
Jane Hill (Viviale, ALPI)
Ian Lloyd (ALPI, The Open Group)

The first project to be discussed was the work on liability in mobile commerce transactions. (led by ETIS)  
There was much discussion on the scope of this work as there is an obvious danger for scope creep.  The agreement was to confine the research of the report to the 

There is much information in the community about what they perceive as a problem in the Internet connected world.  This research should focus on the areas where the core data (i.e. what is the liability and when does it move from point to point in the communication) not well understood.

This project will need to establish a limited set of business processes that should be followed, to decompose the transaction and define where the responsibility lies and the resultant liability.   The project will need to ensure to reference the ETSI work as they have struggled with this issue for some time.  

The security policy project (led by ESI)
Establish if there is a link between a companies liability and the exposure a company is faced with if they do not have a security policy.  Then to determine what the reduction or ability to manage the liability if a security policy is available.  This needs to address the ability of a small business to even establish a policy.  Future research work will be defined into how a policy could be developed for the typical SME (perhaps by industry sector).  This is to recognise that the SME has very limited resources.

Richard notes that the SME community is generally limited in it's awareness of how it can use the e-Commerce channel to market their products.   They need to develop internal business cases for implementing this technology solution.  So there is also an awareness campaign that needs deploying in the SME community.

Note that many large corporations force their suppliers to use technology to communicate with them for general business transactions, but the technology does not interoperate with the other companies that SME may do business with.  Therefore the SME can end up having multiple technology solutions, which do not work together, just as a cost of doing business.  There is therefore little drive from the large businesses for interoperability. 

Note that simply putting stuff up on a web site does not constitute communication with the SME market.  Many of them do not have the infrastructure to gather these communiqués.  They will generally only get (or fetch) information when there is a regulatory requirement.  Therefore the most effective easy of communicating is to do either face to face communications or direct mail.  Again focusing on what is important to them as a business.

The trust services mapping project (led by The Open Group)
The concept behind trust services is to identify those services used by business in the traditional (or bricks and mortar) world to build the required trust in a transaction.  The process will be to identify some business processes, break them down into their constituent parts. Noting that some of this work may be in conjunction with the requirements of the liability in mCommerce project.  The project will then draw up a map of the services that are relied upon, showing what information is sought from the service and how it is currently communicated to the person requiring the information.

The second phase of the project is to identify those services that can or are being delivered electronically, then to identify what information is currently passed electronically.  This will be mapped onto the bricks and mortar version for analysis and recommendations.  It is possible that a list of services that should not, or can not be delivered electronically will be built up. The result will be a definition of what information can be colected, how it should be collected and recommendations for standardisation activities.

Next Steps

The ALPINE team are working towards a kick off meeting on December 3rd 2002 in Paris.

Links

www.alpine-wg.org