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 Contd...

The next step involves radical changes in business architectures. Business architecture includes all activities that an organization plans to pursue to achieve its strategic positioning. Articulating a business architecture that enables an organization to succeed in e-business is very important. This requires answering fundamental question like the elements required for an organization to achieve e-transformation.

E-Transformation requires systematic thinking - understanding the relationships among strategy, marketing, technology and organizational design. Managers have to assess how their business can be redesigned which may involve a reassessment of product/services offerings, processes, partnerships as well as technology architecture. Most importantly, managers have to manage organizational change, build trust and spur organization wide adoption of e-business initiatives. Many traditional ways of doing business will change fundamentally. As various steps of e-business development evolve, more strategic thinking will be required. Organizations have to understand how key resources including capital investments and human talent has to be allocated.

Last but not the least, with the organization's website becoming the 'source' of revenues and customer interaction, care must be taken that it stays online always. Moreover, the website must be scalable, so that later when the organization's online operations grow it can successfully handle more number of customers. Above all, the website must enable secure transactions so that the assets of both the company and the customers are protected.

E-Strategies - Case Studies

In the e-business environment, organizations must focus on their core competencies and should rely on external partners for all their non-core activities. The Internet enables a significant reduction in the cost of inter-organizational coordination and transactions, which fundamentally changes the nature of business relationships and encourages greater use of business partners over internal departments. Business managers have more choice to outsource business processes they require.

This section would detail e-business strategies to improve the efficiency of an organizational value chain. It will explain about e-business strategies, which can significantly improve various organizational functions including supply chain management (SCM), product development, marketing, HR and so on. It will also illustrate the benefits for organizations adopting e-business including shortening of new product development cycle time, providing better information to suppliers and vendors, reducing data integrity issues, significantly enhancing customer experience and more. The e-SCM initiatives typically start with e-procurement with answering questions such as whether there is a need for e-market places for procurement and how to transform SCM from the organization driven inventory building to customer driven order approach.

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