IT-powered Value Chain:

E-Business

Adoption of e--Business

Barriers and Solutions

  

Vadim Kotelnikov personal logo Vadim Kotelnikov

Inventor of Business e-Coach ; Author of ICT for SMEs

 

 

Major Barriers to E-Business Adoption

  • business culture, a people barrier – getting not only the board to agree, but getting the whole company to agree

  • skills – rather business skills, including imagination and creativity, than IT skills

  • threat to valued existing partnerships

  • security, privacy, and complexity

E-Business Planning Process

  • evaluating your company's supply chain

  • evaluating customer relationships

  • benchmarking your e-business progress against your competition

  • planning the right balance of your e-business systems

Three Stages to E-Business Implementation

  1. Putting up web pages with non transactional, read-only information

  2. Starting thinking transactions with business application integration, along with e-commerce, CRM, SEM, or an e-marketplace

  3. Designing business so that it takes e-business into account and the technology provides an opportunity for business model innovation

 

Cutting Costs and Generating Business Value at Intel Corp.

Best Practices

IT/Business Alignment

Top 10 Tips

  • Clearly define and articulate the benefits you expect from your system... More

11 Traits of a True IT Leader

Start with an Agreed-upon Plan

If you decided to integrate e-business into your entire enterprise, start with a roadmap – an agreed-upon plan with mutually acknowledged mileposts for tracking achievement of success. It would allow you to grow faster, to be more productive, and more satisfied with the progress toward becoming an e-business.

Planning Process

The e-business implementation process includes evaluating a company's supply chain, its customer relationship, and an e-business assessment survey. This survey would enable your company to benchmark your e-business progress against similar-sized companies.

To identify business opportunities, risks and process improvements, you require good understanding of how suppliers, distributors, retailers, ultimate end users, joint venture partners, and even competitors interrelate. Depicting your company's various relationships with suppliers, vendors, and customers graphically in a "Value Web" can help your company leaders and advisers to understand better how they integrate with each other. This would enable you to plan the right balance of systems, to address both the front end and the back end of your business.

Apply 80/20 Principle

The return on investment usually follows the 80/20 rule: 80% of the benefits will be found in the simplest 20% of the system. Most software spends 80% of its time executing only 20% of the available instructions... More

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Leading IT organizations are organized around collections of related services, rather than around vendor products. The goal of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is to design and develop all the business functions that go into a software application as independent "services," which can then be combined in different ways to complete a number of different processes. Because the same service can be used for different applications, it can be reused as necessary. The result: a more efficient use of IT resources.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

EAI is software that enables business process integration and business-to-business (B2B) collaboration by allowing data sharing between unrelated systems in an organization and beyond.

EAI enables business not only to unify information throughout an enterprise, most importantly it also provides the flexibility to add functionality, such as sales force management, customer relationship management (CRM), or more, without rendering existing systems obsolete. EAI serves as a just-in-time information manager that helps data move along as processes require.

Applications do not need to be modified to connect to and share data through the EAI architecture. Specifications and rules can be modified, accommodating changes in one application without affecting the other systems or interfaces.

 

 

 

 

References:

  1. Best Practices for Achieving the "Connected Enterprise", White Paper by iSoft

  2. Bridging the IT/Business Divide”, David Caddis

  3. "The Four Phases of IT/Business Alignment," Mary Nugent, BMC Software

  4. "What IT Leadership Look Like?" Stephanie Overby, CIO.com

  5. "The Rise of the IT Architect," Ryan DeBeasi, Network World

  6. "IT: Transforming Business," Stacy Smith, CIO.com

  7. Business Process Management: The Third Wave, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar

  8. "Measure of Alignment Predicts Success," Ellen Pearlman and Edward H. Baker, CIO Insight

  9. "Services Software Architecture: Efficient but Threatening?" CIO Insight

  10. The One Page Project Manager for IT Projects, Clark A. Campbell