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-Business Strategies for Organizations

To develop a sustainable e-business strategy or e-strategy that can deliver positive results is a challenging task. The task involves going through a series of steps involving building awareness of the potential of e-business, alignment of business processes and initiating strategic change within the organization.

The IT department initiates most of the e-business projects with little involvement of the senior management including CEOs and CFOs. As mentioned earlier, most of the executives view e-business projects with a narrow focus and have preconceived notions that it is just adding another sales channel. Hence, a major awareness exercise must be initiated among the employees to broaden their understanding about the potential of e-business, how its affects the business processes and how it can radically change the existing ways of doing business. Any successful e-business initiative requires a strong partnership between the senior management in IT and business departments. Though technology will remain as the major driver for e-business projects, senior staff from business departments if explained well about the rationale behind these projects will expedite IT expenditure related decisions.

The departments can jointly take decisions regarding the e-business strategy, projects specific priorities and various project implementation approaches. While IT related inputs is important on strategies for implementing e-business initiatives, business related inputs for all e-business projects related decisions, is equally important. Hence, e-business also provides an opportunity to improve relationships between IT and business departments. While the senior management in the IT department understands more about the economics and operational issues of business, the senior management from business departments learns how IT projects can improve the efficiency of business processes.

In the past, most of the organizations' e-business efforts were limited to using the Internet as marketing channel. However, 'e-enabling' an organization involves digitizing all business processes from order entry to customer service and from internal administrative processes to procurement of raw materials.

The journey of e-enabling the organization typically starts with the establishment of transaction enabled website which allows the customers to buy the organization's products and services and make payments online. One of the first steps here is to develop content including product information, company related news, products evaluations and so on for the website. This gives a rationale for the customers to visit the organization's site.

The next step aims at improving internal efficiencies communicating within the organizations through Intranets, online communication tools like conferencing and discussion groups and knowledge management systems. Regular internal communication helps the organization's knowledge workers to share and disseminate knowledge, thus helping the organization to respond faster compared to its competitors in response to new business models, markets and technology.

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