EBusiness
Introduction

What is EBusiness? -- Today eBusiness means more than just putting up a standard website. It now means using the Internet proactively to reach beyond corporate walls to establish powerful new connections with customers and business partners.

What does it impact? -- EBusiness now impacts all primary business dimensions; marketing, operations, corporate, human resources, and innovation. EBusiness technologies enable you to establish a flexible business infrastructure that supports powerful new marketing capabilities, greater operational efficiencies, more effective financial strategies, a more productive workforce, and an effective framework for innovation and self reinvention. Above all, it enables substantial business leverage through the formalisation of business relationships.

How does it change things? -- The Internet has caused a shift in power towards the customer. As a result, the customer interface is increasingly becoming the primary 'battleground' in business. EBusiness causes a shift in the focus of your business model to the customer. In addition, because of the flexibility it affords, it can also cause a change in the management paradigm in order to control 'continuous change', and to capitalise on emerging opportunities.

How do I harness it? -- EBusiness should be approached holistically from a management perspective to incrementally enhance your current business model. The priority should be to harness it where it will have the most significant and immediate payoff, both to profitability and to securing market 'real-estate' in order to establish stable competitive advantages.

Can it be ignored? -- To remain competitive in today's business climate, an eBusiness component is becoming an essential part of any business strategy. To meet the future without one is to be vulnerable to your competitors who do embrace eBusiness. In an increasingly fast-moving business climate, businesses will be forced into a mode of 'management by crisis' if they are without the right system infrastructure to address new challenges, take advantage of emerging opportunities, and incrementally evolve themselves. Businesses can find themselves in a position where a competitor has secured permanent bonded relationships with the customers in a market, and essentially locked them out of that market.

Conclusion --By adding an eBusiness component to your business model, you should expect

• higher sales from more market channels;
• stronger relationships with customers/clients, and to be able to rapidly form new business alliances;
• greater efficiencies operationally and in your value chain;
• more flexible and realistic financial models;
• higher productivity; and
• more effective innovation.

  These benefits result in three primary business outcomes --

  • Greater Profitability
  • Stable competitive advantages
  • Positioning the business for new opportunity, growth, and to self reinvention.

  In summary, e-Business technologies are impacting business strategies at a fundamental level.