Major
Barriers to
E-Business Adoption |
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business culture, a
people barrier – getting not only the board to agree, but getting
the whole company to agree
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skills – rather business
skills, including
imagination and
creativity,
than IT skills
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threat to valued existing partnerships
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security, privacy, and
complexity
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E-Business Planning
Process |
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evaluating your company's
supply chain
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evaluating customer
relationships
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benchmarking your e-business progress against your competition
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planning the right
balance of your e-business
systems
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Three Stages to E-Business
Implementation |
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Putting up web pages with
non transactional, read-only information
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Starting thinking
transactions with business application integration, along with
e-commerce,
CRM, SEM, or an e-marketplace
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Designing business so that
it takes e-business into account and the technology provides an
opportunity for
business
model
innovation
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Cutting Costs and
Generating Business Value at Intel Corp.
Best Practices
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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.
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