Managing E-Business - Concepts and Cases

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e-business, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IT expenditures, HRMS, Xerox PeopleNet, Dell.com, TVS eShop, AutoXchange, Covisint, CarPoint

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E-Strategies - An Introduction Contd...

Organizations have to perform a strategic assessment of the options available to them. A well-planned e-business strategy involves a strategic assessment of the following questions:
* Is the company ready to enter new businesses and exit existing ones?

* Which business processes have to be reshaped by the company?

* Whether the company's scale of operations is large enough to bear additional e-business related expenditures?

* What core competencies are most important in the e-business environment and which of them does the company has to acquire?

* What threats and opportunities does e-business offer to the company's business?

* What is the timing and intensity of the company's response to the above threats and opportunities based on the consumer's willingness to purchase the company's offerings online?

While developing an e-business strategy, the assessment of current state of affairs in the organization is very important. This involves understanding the impact of the Internet on the organization's products, assessing the online demand for the organization's products and services, understanding the organization's preparation to deliver its offerings online and analyzing the impact of shifting an organization's delivery systems online.

To identify major e-business opportunities and develop an e-business strategy that enhances its competitive position the organization has to systematically define company/industry related processes and analyze the economic relevance of e-business on each of these processes. Then the organizations must rank these processes according to their strategic importance and the costs involved. The most economical and strategically relevant process should be digitized first and accordingly appropriate resources must be allocated to it.

Last but not the least, organizations have to analyze that by digitizing their businesses will they be offering customers better value proposition. Following questions can be asked to do the analysis:
* Will it help in serving the customers more effectively?
* Will it enable customers to do business more conveniently?
* Will it expand offerings for the current customers or allow reaching new customers?
* Will it help in collaborating more effectively with the company's business partners?

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