Managing E-Business - Concepts and Cases

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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.
 

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.

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.

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