Andrew Grove, the chairman of
Intel, recently stated, "In five years, there won’t be any Internet
companies because they will all be Internet companies …..Otherwise
they will die". Andy, known for his accurate predictions on
technology advancements, is not alone this time. Most technology and
management guru’s and Industry watchers agree with him.
Mankind has for long been using technological advances for
business advantages. There have however been few technology
breakthroughs in recent times that have had such a prolific impact
on businesses and lives of people as the Internet and the Web.
Perhaps the most significant invention after the computers, the rate
of adoption for Internet has beaten wildest of the estimates. Only a
small percentage of businesses (approximately 10% ) are at present
undecided about getting on to the Internet bandwagon. For most
others, either the adoption is initiated, or the question is of
‘when’ and not ‘whether’.
In this article we address several issues of e-Business
readiness. We shall take a close look at what e-Business and
e-Commerce are all about, and the impact of ‘e’ on businesses. We
shall also look at the development stages for a business to become
an e-Business, evaluate what it takes to ‘get there’, and what the
risks involved are.
e-Business is the powerful business environment created when all
the key business processes of a traditional corporate get
re-engineered and transformed through the use of Internet
technologies. The critical business systems of such an organization
would be directly connected to the customers, employees, suppliers
and business partners. Intranet, Extranet and e-Commerce form the
backbone of systems at such an organization. Groupware,
collaborative applications and workflow tie them all together.
e-Business helps organizations become the Interactive
Enterprise.
e-Commerce is an important,
but not a mandatory component of e-Business. It deals with the
activities of buying and selling. While not all e-Businesses would
be involved in E-Commerce, for organizations selling directly to
consumers, E-Commerce is vital. It has changed the way many
companies conduct businesses and has introduced a new category of
virtual online businesses. The traditional procurement and
fulfillment processes have undergone dramatic changes. The ‘access
anytime’ and ‘finalize now’ concepts have also enhanced the customer
expectations of response times from businesses.
Business-to-Business (B2B) and
Business-to-Consumer (B2C) are the two models of e-Commerce. It is
however the B2B scenerio that is going to dominate with over 80% of
business coming from that segment within the next 2 years. Forrester
estimates the B2B e-commerce generate over US $ 842 billion in
revenue by 2002. While immense efforts have been going on in this
direction, the ultimate success of e-Business for organizations is
dependent on their state of readiness for this transformation.
Whatever be the corporate
culture, having clearly stated policies and well thought out,
meaningful processes are a pre-requisite to the success of an
e-Business. These policies and processes help in the management of
cultural issues. These policies need to address the issue of
Intranet/ Extranet/ Internet ‘Usage’. It must define what
constitutes a business related usgae, define the acceptable
‘non-business’ related usage and also what is prohibited.
‘Openness’ comes with its own set of issues. While an information
might be known to a group of people, the organizational processes
need to clearly define the primary and secondary responsibilities
for people involved. ‘Collaboration’ and work flow also requires
people to be more responsive to each other and to the organization.
Well identified rules and escalation processes are necessary for the
success of an e-Business.
The ‘anytime access’ that web provides to a customer, also keeps
increasing the customer expectation levels in several dimensions.
The Web Customer expects responses in web-time. This may require an
organization to completely restructure in order to become customer
care oriented. This means higher agility, reduced fulfillment times
and dependable support systems. Organizations often require to
re-engineer most of their processes on the way to becoming
e-Businesses.
While the culture of e-Business is generally very open, business
needs often dictate a high level of security. For an e-Business
organization therefore, the open Internet culture must coexist with
the corporate requirement for secure information. This calls for
defining the security & user privilege policies and their
technological implementation. A fundamental requirement of
e-Commerce is the secure payment processing and the transaction
security. Hackers and those indulging in industrial espionage abound
on the net and sites need to be constantly protected against them.
While all e-commerce transactions are encrypted, organizational
processes and systems must be geared up to log all system accesses
and transactions and also be able to track any unauthorized access
or attempts to break through the security net. While technology
plays a key role in ensuring e-Commerce security, the technical
measures alone do not move all risks. The organizational usage and
access policies and their enforcement, system security checks,
technology penetration tests and keeping track of laws regulating
international e-Commerce transactions are all key elements that an
e-Business organization has to be geared up to handle.
Technology is of-course the e-Business enabler. It impacts and
permeates through almost everything that needs to be done for
ensuring a successful e-Business. While e-Business solution are
strategy centric, they are technology intensive. Organizations do
have now available a set of technologies to choose from. The choice
of technology is important and needs to be done with care. Factors
influencing this choice could be the existent infrastructure with
the organization, business objectives, tools to be used and the
skill set availability, amongst others. Technology impacts not just
the choice of development platform, it also is key in matters of
security, access & usage control and the overall enterprise wide
system architecture design. Investments in to the training of IT
staff in the chosen technologies pay high dividends.
E-Businesses require powerful and resilient infrastructure.
Having powerful machines, with adequate redundancy and backup
arrangements, high bandwidth network connections and a near 100%
uptime for systems need to be guaranteed for the implementation of
e-Business systems. Organizations might need to either host their
systems with a third party (may be an ISP), or make investments to
ensure this infrastructure and also in recruitment of skilled
manpower to support these systems round the clock.
While e-Commerce in its simplest form does involve on-line
catalog-based purchasing, the information and features provided by
present day systems are very comprehensive and complex. Moreover, a
sophisticated front-end e-Commerce system critically requires
equally efficient backend systems for support. The web customer
demands transparency, shortened response times and reliable
fulfillment commitments. Efficient customer care requires robust
bookkeeping and other enterprise wide systems available and
integrated with the e-Commerce front-end applications. Absence of
these would otherwise cause the customer loose trust and
patience.
E-Businesses need to remain current and robust. The data and
information placed on the web, which is open for access to all those
authorized, needs to be accurate and current. E-Businesses need to
define several new roles in the organization to do this. The web
information framework encompasses four primary roles –
Administrators, Authors, Publishers and Creative managers. Authors
are responsible for creating the content that goes to the web. The
self-service customer requires a ‘Creatives’ manager to work on the
user interface and navigation aspects. The publisher is responsible
for putting the author’s content on the web. They are responsible
for managing, coordinating and communicating the information
content. Administrators are responsible for the technical management
of the web site and its different category of
users.
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