The basic nature of commerce has not changed but our ability to communicate quickly, widely, and deeply has. This document explores the changes and challenges that these new abilities bring to the conduct of business for all organizations. eBusiness, I contend, is the process of delivering any part of your business to any audience wherever they are. I'll discuss what this statement means focusing on the following points:
A newly created magazine proclaims in its advertisements "Forget everything you know about business. It's all changed now." The assumption, of course is that the basic fabric of business has changed. This is a recent but widespread belief fed by the fantastic appeal of the new information technologies. Before the Web, there was just business. While processes and technology changed it was still possible to know and understand how to do business. Lately, as the ability to do business over the Web has become a reality, many organizations have lost their balance and have the uneasy feeling that the rules have changed somehow. They have been led to believe that the new capabilities of the Web alter the basic nature of business.
I don't believe this is true. Rather, I side with the client of mine who recently said, "Some day there will just be business again. We will just happen to do it electronically." I believe that the basic rules of business have not changed. Know your customer, project a good image, and provide real value are as true today as they were in the markets and bazaars of a thousand years ago. Electronic business is simply the latest way to put the basic rules into action. Be this as it may, I've seen too many strong business people forget what they know as they wrestle with what they don't know. By remaining centered on the parts of business that do not change, you can retain a sharp ability to ask the right questions and appropriately judge the kaleidoscope of technologies that will pass in and out of focus in the coming years.
On the other hand, the impact of the digital revolution on the conduct (if not the principles) of business is profound. Our current and future ability to communicate instantly and widely will alter deeply the way most of us do our business. I use the term eBusiness to capture the notion of using digital technologies to do business. No matter what type of business an organization is involved in: commercial, non profit, government or any other, they will have to digitally create and deliver value to some group of people. The concepts of eBusiness are not of use only to commercial organizations. All organizations must learn to do eBusiness.
eBusiness is the process of delivering any part of your business to any audience wherever they are. eBusiness does not change the basis of business, but it does change the practice of business. In particular, eBusiness brings a quantitative change in these aspects of business:
To explore further, lets drill through the definition of eBusiness one piece at a time.
eBusiness is not a set of static outputs, but rater a dynamic "best fit" of your practices to the environment inside and outside your organization. Because the technology is continually shifting, it is not possible stand still. Because the relationships between your organization and its audiences, information, and business practice is constantly shifting, you had better not stand still.
The technologies behind eBusiness are new and will change. Applications for customer relationship management, campaign management, self-service procurement, vender relations, automated fulfillment and a host of others are barely out of their first versions. In addition, the underlying infrastructure on Web servers is also in flux. Finally, new delivery platforms (such as Web enabled phones) are appearing each month. What you can do is changing so rapidly that you have no choice but to consider eBusiness a process.
With or without the new electronic medium, business is best done dynamically. Regardless of the way you conduct business, you are best served by continuously reassessing your audiences, your products and the ways you present your products to your audiences. As any one of the three change, the other two must adjust to make use of new possibilities and jettison things that no longer work. Thus, business itself is a process that continually shifts.
To do eBusiness, you create a system for production not a particular product. You focus more on how you will constantly readjust to the changing landscape of technology, your audiences, information, practices, and publications than on any particular configuration.
eBusiness is the process of electronically delivering your business. Generally, you deliver your business through computer networks and onto someone's computer screen. But the essence of eBusiness is not in the particular way in which you deliver, but in the fact that the essential parts of your business are stored and managed digitally and can be delivered in whatever medium you desire. By digitizing the information and services your organization provides, it becomes available for delivery over digital or non-digital channels. Your own Internet site is only one of these channels. Others include:
eBusiness is the process of delivering the right parts of your business at the right times. What are the parts of your business? Loosely, we can break these parts into information and interactions.
To do eBusiness, the wide and possibly unorganized information and interactions that are key to your organization have to be identified, digitized and segmented into useful chunks so that they can be delivered individually to those who need them.
More aptly called functionality, interaction is the user interface and computer code that gives audiences the ability to communicate back to the organization in order to carry on their business with the organization.
eBusiness delivers any part of your business to any audience (or more specifically any audience you can reach). In the commercial organizations audiences are segments of your customers, staff, and partner organizations. In non profit organizations customers may be replaced by members or constituents, but the idea is the same. All organizations have some form of internal, external, and partner audiences.
To do eBusiness, you must have a clear idea of who is out there that you need to communicate and interact with. Your audiences may be customers, members, staff, partners, or constituents. Whoever they are, they are the final judges of your efforts. In addition, your audiences are groups of people with distinct information and functionality needs. Defining and refining your knowledge of your audiences is crucial to the conduct of eBusiness.
eBusiness means being present and ready to interact with someone wherever they are when they want to interact with you. Today, the overwhelming majority of organizations are focused on their Web site as the place to communicate with the outside world. They see the Web as the medium for communication and they want their site to be a prime location on the net. The assumption is that if you build it and it is good, they will find you and come. With enough marketing or public relations this may be true. But for the vast majority of organizations, getting people to find them and come is a tricky proposition. Undoubtedly, each organization needs a Web site that has their official and comprehensive information. However, the essence of eBusiness is the ability to go to your audiences rather then waiting for them to come to you.
As one example among many, consider a government organization who wants to communicate new regulations to its offices. They will certainly want to list the new regulations completely on their Web site. But are there other ways they could reach their intended audiences (staff members, say, in many locations)? Rather than expecting that staff will come to the Web site, the organization could send targeted email to the staff highlighting just the relevant sections of the new regulations. In addition, they could send automatic faxes to individuals that show the most important changes. Finally, they could produce small printable color posters, and email them to the office managers with instructions to print them out and hang them in a prominent place. In this way, the information is targeted and delivered to the intended audience rather than passively listed somewhere.
Knowing where a person is when they need to do business with you and being there with the right information and functionality is essential to eBusiness.
eBusiness is the process of delivering any part of your business to any audience wherever they are. Even if the definition of eBusiness is clear, how to do it is not. In fact, it is often not clear at all to organizations how to make all of this happen. If we follow the definition of eBusiness above, however, these dictates quickly surface:
Organizations have been doing this more or less formally forever. On the other hand, establishing technology and process to effectively divide the organization into parts and deliver them electronically is new and far from well understood.
You can do eBusiness the same way you do content management. In a content management system, you create a process to collect, manage and publish information and functionality to a set of target audiences. Information and functionality are the content of eBusiness. To do eBusiness or content management, you must:
If your organization is wise, it will look past the hype and vague promises of eBusiness and focus instead on how to use the new technologies that become available to do what you have always needed to do. Recognizing that business is a process, the wise organization will create the right feedback channels so that your audiences can help you continually reexamine what information and functionality you are collecting and managing and what publications serve your goals and their goals most fully.