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E- Business
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By Amina Mushtaq
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E- Business
What Is E-Business
Electronic business is in its simplest form the conduct of business on the internet. It is a more generic term then e commerce, because it refers to not only buying and selling but also servicing customers and collaborating with business partners. E business include the buying and selling of goods and services along with providing technical or customer support through the internet e business is a term often used in conjunction with e commerce but includes services in addition to the sales of goods.
The Development of E-Commerce and E-Business
Since the dot.com era, has gradually migrated from solely e-technology driven to a more matured status where enterprises leverage on both new opportunities brought by advanced e-technologies and unique e-commerce/e-business strategies for the objectives including operational cost saving and value-adding services provision. The more seamlessly people expect the new generation e-applications to support e-business activities, the deeper and more sophisticated penetration of e-technologies into business processes will be required, leading to eventually more radical transformation of the underlying processes (e-transformation). It is the multi-disciplinary nature of this field that makes the broad and crosscutting characteristics.
The Top Ten E-Business Trends for the 21st Century
1. E-Business will become a critical competitive strategy that will revolutionize the global economy.
2. Learn to manage customers' relationships by virtually serving their needs "24 ¥ 7"—24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
3. E-business that enables customers to personalize and customize products or services will flourish
4. Using the Net to find new customers and to better target customer preferences will be a standard practice.
5. Producing, marketing, and distributing products or services online will be a cost-effective strategy for business.
6. Learning to develop and serve online communities with niche interests will be essential to building customer loyalty.
7. E-business models that provide greater choice for customers will change the traditional economics of supply and demand.
8. Ready access to the Net from multiple gateways—cable TV, satellite, wireless telephones, and other devices—will greatly expand e-business opportunities.
9. Highly efficient e-business virtual supply chains will intimately link manufacturers and producers directly to customers.
10. Reach over one billion people and generate more than $2 trillion in revenues worldwide by 2005.
E- Business And E- Technologies
E-business involves the use of electronic platforms-intranets-extranets, and the internet, to conduct a company's business. The internet and other technologies now help companies carry on their business faster, more accurately, and over a wider range of time and space. Countless companies have set up websites to inform about and promote their product and services. They have created intranets to help employees communicate with each other and access information found in the company computers. They have set up extranets with major suppliers and distributors to assist information and exchange Orders, transitions, and payments. Companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, and oracle run almost entirely as e-business in which memos, invoices, engineering drawings, sales and marketing information –virtually every thing –happens over the internet instead of on paper.
VOIP(Voice Over Internet Protocol)
Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network.
First-generation VoIP services, characterized by poor audio quality and the need to link household phones to a PC network, are finally giving way to consumer-oriented offerings that provide superior audio quality and simplified installation.
Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.
E-Mail
Electronic mail (abbreviated "e-mail" or, often, "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term "e-mail" (as a noun or verb) applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other. Often these workgroup collaboration organizations may use the Internet protocols for internal e-mail service.
Voice Mail
Voicemail (or voice mail, vmail or VMS, sometimes called messagebank) is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people. In its simplest form it mimics the functions of an answering machine, uses a standard telephone handset for the user interface, and uses a centralized, computerized system rather than equipment at the individual telephone. Voicemail systems are much more sophisticated than answering machines in that they can:
answer many phones at the same time
store incoming voice messages in personalized mailboxes associated with the user's phone number
enable users to forward received messages to another voice mailbox
send messages to one or more other user voice mailboxes
add a voice introduction to a forwarded message
store voice messages for future delivery
make calls to a telephone or paging service to notify the user a message has arrived in his mailbox
transfer callers to another phone number for personal assistance
play different message greetings to different callers.
Web conferencing
Web conferencing is used to hold group meetings or live presentations over the Internet. In the early years of the Internet, the terms "web conferencing" and "computer conferencing" were often used to refer to group discussions conducted within a message board (via posted text messages), but the term has evolved to refer specifically to "live" or "synchronous" meetings, while the posted message variety of discussion is called a "forum", "message board", or "bulletin board".
In a web conference, each participant sits at their own computer, and is connected to other participants via the internet. The most basic feature of a web conference is screen sharing, whereby conference participants see whatever is on the presenter's screen. Usually this is accompanied by voice communication, either through a traditional telephone conference, or through VoIP, although sometimes text chat is used in place of voice.
Advantages Of E- Business
E business and compititions
§ The Internet has lowered barriers to entry for new retailers.
§ Many e-business startups now compete with long-established firms.
§ Since the web is undifferentiated, web sites for both new and old companies have essentially the same appeal.
§ On the Web, delivery and responsiveness are key to competitiveness, not simply how the web site looks.
E business and security
§ Security used to be a major consideration for Web-based e-business, but is less so now as e-commerce security continues to improve.
§ Traditional credit systems are also vulnerable to security breaches such as forging signatures or using credit card numbers taken from discarded or stolen receipts.
§ Security innovations using secure servers, digital signatures and encryption are now widespread.
Speed advantages of E-business
§ E-business systems also generally process transactions more quickly than human operators. Orders can be processed in real-time.
§ Catalogs can be maintained online, so the need
to print and mail them is gone.
§ In the case of some information products, such as MP3 based music files, the products themselves can be downloaded from the web, lead time to nothing.
Cost advantages of E-business
§ E-business systems require less human interaction so less labor and training is required.
§ Another area of cost savings is through reductions in inventory costs.
Other major advantages are
§ Trek through and aisles to find and examine products
§ They can do comparative shopping by browsing through mail catalogs or surfing web sites.
§ Direct marketers never close their doors.
§ Buying is easy and private; customer encounters fewer buying hassles and don't have to face salespeople or open themselves up to persuasion and emotional pitches.
§ Business buyer can learn about and buy products and services without waiting for and tying time with salespeople.
§ It provides buyers with greater product access and selection.
§ Beyond a broader selection of sellers and products-commerce channels also give buyers access to a wealth of comparative information, information about companies, products and competitors.
§ Good sites often provide more information in more useful forms than even the most solicitous sales person can. for example Amazon.com offer top-10 product list, extensive product descriptions, expert and user product reviews and recommendations based on customer's previous purchases.
§ Online buying is interactive and immediate. Buyers often can interact with the seller's sits to create exactly the configuration of information of products, or services, they desire. Then order or download them on the spot.
§ Internet gives consumers a greater measure of control. Like nothing else before it. The internet has empowered consumers.
Challenges of E Business
The new millennium brought with it new possibilities in terms of informationaccess and availability, simultaneously introducing new challenges in protectingsensitive information from some eyes while making it available to others. TheInternet allows businesses to use information more effectively, by allowingcustomers, suppliers, employees, and partners to get access to the businessinformation they need, when they need it. These Internet-enabled services alltranslate to reduced cost: there are less overhead, greater economies of scale, andincreased efficiency. E-business' greatest promise is more timely, more valuableinformation accessible to more people, at reduced cost of information access.
The needs of e-business security
While putting business systems on the Internet offers potentially unlimitedopportunities for increasing efficiency and reducing cost, it also offers potentially unlimited risk. The Internet provides much greater access to data, and to morevaluable data, not only to legitimate users, but also to hackers, disgruntledemployees, criminals, and corporate spies.
Scalability With Large User Communities
The sheer size of the user communities which can access business systems via theInternet not only increases the risk to those systems, it also constrains thesolutions which can be deployed to address that risk. The Internet createschallenges in terms of scalability of security mechanisms, management of thosemechanisms, and the need to make them standard and interoperable.
Security mechanisms for Internet-enabled systems must support much largercommunities of users than systems that are not Internet-enabled. Whereas thelargest traditional enterprise systems typically supported thousands of users, manyInternet-enabled systems have millions of users.
Manageability
Traditional mechanisms for identifying users and managing their access, such asgranting each user an account and password on each system he accesses, may notbe practical in an Internet environment. It rapidly becomes too difficult andexpensive for system administrators to manage separate accounts for each user onevery system.
Interoperability
Unlike traditional enterprise systems, where a company owns and controls allcomponents of the system, Internet-enabled e-business systems must exchangedata with systems owned and controlled by others: customers, suppliers, partnersetc. Security mechanisms deployed in e-business systems must therefore bestandards based, flexible, and interoperable, to ensure that they work with others'systems. They must support browsers, and work in multi-tier architectures withone or more middle tiers such as web servers and application servers.
Hosted Systems and Exchanges
The principal security challenge of hosting is keeping data from different hosteduser communities separate. The simplest way of doing this is to create physicallyseparate systems for each hosted community. The disadvantage of this approach isthat it requires a separate computer, with separately installed, managed, and configured software, for each hosted user community, providing little economiesof scale to a hosting company. Mechanisms that allow multiple different usercommunities to share a single hardware and software instance, keep data fordifferent user communities separate, and allow a single administrative interfacefor the hosting provider, can greatly reduce costs for the hosting service provider.
E-business depends on providing customers, partners, and employees with access to information, in a way that is controlled and secure. Managing e-businesssecurity is a multifaceted challenge and requires the coordination of businesspolicy and practice with appropriate technology. In addition to deployingstandards bases, flexible and interoperable systems, the technology must provideassurance of the security provided in the products.
As technology matures and secure e-business systems are deployed, companieswill be better positioned to manage the risks associated with disintermediation ofdata access. Through this process businesses will enhance their competitive edgewhile also working to protect critical business infrastructures from malefactorslike hackers, disgruntled employees, criminals and corporate spies.
Why E-business needs E-technology
Technologies perform three vital roles in business firms. That is, they support an organization's business operations, managerial decision making and strategic advantage. Information technology has also become an indispensable ingredient in several major business strategies that businesses are implementing to meet the challenges of rapidly changing business environment. These include internet working the enterprise, globalization, business process reengineering, and using information technology for strategic competitive advantage.
What Technologies are Necessary for E- Business?
Online Transaction Processing Systems play a strategic role in E-business. Many firms are using the internet, extranet, and other networks that tie them electronically to their customers or suppliers for online transaction processing (OLTP). Such real time systems which capture transaction and process transactions immediately can help them provide superior service to customers and other trading partners.
EFT(electronic fund transfer) systems are major form of electronic payment systems in banking and retailing industries. EFT systems use a variety of information technologies to capture and process money and credit transfers between banks and businesses and their customers.
Intranet applications of companies have demonstrated impressive returns, quick payback, and other strategic benefits. Major cost saving come from replacing company publications and documents on paper with electronic multimedia versions published to web servers.
Extranet primary role is to link the internet resources of a company to the intranets of its customers, suppliers, and other business partners. Thus, extranet provide significant business value by facilitating and strengthening the business relationships of a company with customers and suppliers, improving collaboration with its business partners, and enabling the development of new kinds of web-based service for its customers, suppliers and others.
Conclusion
Having analyzed traditional approaches to e-business and current examples of online business process automation, the remainder of this paper discusses ideas to extend e-business beyond tomorrow. In particular, as well as building on the aspects of community, responsibility transfer, and whole-supply-chain automation, it incorporates a number of specific advanced principles:
Widening of communities to indirect parties
Deepening of communities to build trust-based e-business relationships
Symmetrical responsibility design
Policy-driven e-business
Autonomous management within communities
Knowledge-directed data sharing
Electronic business is in its simplest form the conduct of business on the internet. It is a more generic term then e commerce, because it refers to not only buying and selling but also servicing customers and collaborating with business partners. E business include the buying and selling of goods and services along with providing technical or customer support through the internet e business is a term often used in conjunction with e commerce but includes services in addition to the sales of goods.
The Development of E-Commerce and E-Business
Since the dot.com era, has gradually migrated from solely e-technology driven to a more matured status where enterprises leverage on both new opportunities brought by advanced e-technologies and unique e-commerce/e-business strategies for the objectives including operational cost saving and value-adding services provision. The more seamlessly people expect the new generation e-applications to support e-business activities, the deeper and more sophisticated penetration of e-technologies into business processes will be required, leading to eventually more radical transformation of the underlying processes (e-transformation). It is the multi-disciplinary nature of this field that makes the broad and crosscutting characteristics.
The Top Ten E-Business Trends for the 21st Century
1. E-Business will become a critical competitive strategy that will revolutionize the global economy.
2. Learn to manage customers' relationships by virtually serving their needs "24 ¥ 7"—24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
3. E-business that enables customers to personalize and customize products or services will flourish
4. Using the Net to find new customers and to better target customer preferences will be a standard practice.
5. Producing, marketing, and distributing products or services online will be a cost-effective strategy for business.
6. Learning to develop and serve online communities with niche interests will be essential to building customer loyalty.
7. E-business models that provide greater choice for customers will change the traditional economics of supply and demand.
8. Ready access to the Net from multiple gateways—cable TV, satellite, wireless telephones, and other devices—will greatly expand e-business opportunities.
9. Highly efficient e-business virtual supply chains will intimately link manufacturers and producers directly to customers.
10. Reach over one billion people and generate more than $2 trillion in revenues worldwide by 2005.
E- Business And E- Technologies
E-business involves the use of electronic platforms-intranets-extranets, and the internet, to conduct a company's business. The internet and other technologies now help companies carry on their business faster, more accurately, and over a wider range of time and space. Countless companies have set up websites to inform about and promote their product and services. They have created intranets to help employees communicate with each other and access information found in the company computers. They have set up extranets with major suppliers and distributors to assist information and exchange Orders, transitions, and payments. Companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, and oracle run almost entirely as e-business in which memos, invoices, engineering drawings, sales and marketing information –virtually every thing –happens over the internet instead of on paper.
VOIP(Voice Over Internet Protocol)
Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network.
First-generation VoIP services, characterized by poor audio quality and the need to link household phones to a PC network, are finally giving way to consumer-oriented offerings that provide superior audio quality and simplified installation.
Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.
Electronic mail (abbreviated "e-mail" or, often, "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term "e-mail" (as a noun or verb) applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other. Often these workgroup collaboration organizations may use the Internet protocols for internal e-mail service.
Voice Mail
Voicemail (or voice mail, vmail or VMS, sometimes called messagebank) is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people. In its simplest form it mimics the functions of an answering machine, uses a standard telephone handset for the user interface, and uses a centralized, computerized system rather than equipment at the individual telephone. Voicemail systems are much more sophisticated than answering machines in that they can:
answer many phones at the same time
store incoming voice messages in personalized mailboxes associated with the user's phone number
enable users to forward received messages to another voice mailbox
send messages to one or more other user voice mailboxes
add a voice introduction to a forwarded message
store voice messages for future delivery
make calls to a telephone or paging service to notify the user a message has arrived in his mailbox
transfer callers to another phone number for personal assistance
play different message greetings to different callers.
Web conferencing
Web conferencing is used to hold group meetings or live presentations over the Internet. In the early years of the Internet, the terms "web conferencing" and "computer conferencing" were often used to refer to group discussions conducted within a message board (via posted text messages), but the term has evolved to refer specifically to "live" or "synchronous" meetings, while the posted message variety of discussion is called a "forum", "message board", or "bulletin board".
In a web conference, each participant sits at their own computer, and is connected to other participants via the internet. The most basic feature of a web conference is screen sharing, whereby conference participants see whatever is on the presenter's screen. Usually this is accompanied by voice communication, either through a traditional telephone conference, or through VoIP, although sometimes text chat is used in place of voice.
Advantages Of E- Business
E business and compititions
§ The Internet has lowered barriers to entry for new retailers.
§ Many e-business startups now compete with long-established firms.
§ Since the web is undifferentiated, web sites for both new and old companies have essentially the same appeal.
§ On the Web, delivery and responsiveness are key to competitiveness, not simply how the web site looks.
E business and security
§ Security used to be a major consideration for Web-based e-business, but is less so now as e-commerce security continues to improve.
§ Traditional credit systems are also vulnerable to security breaches such as forging signatures or using credit card numbers taken from discarded or stolen receipts.
§ Security innovations using secure servers, digital signatures and encryption are now widespread.
Speed advantages of E-business
§ E-business systems also generally process transactions more quickly than human operators. Orders can be processed in real-time.
§ Catalogs can be maintained online, so the need
§ In the case of some information products, such as MP3 based music files, the products themselves can be downloaded from the web, lead time to nothing.
Cost advantages of E-business
§ E-business systems require less human interaction so less labor and training is required.
§ Another area of cost savings is through reductions in inventory costs.
Other major advantages are
§ Trek through and aisles to find and examine products
§ They can do comparative shopping by browsing through mail catalogs or surfing web sites.
§ Direct marketers never close their doors.
§ Buying is easy and private; customer encounters fewer buying hassles and don't have to face salespeople or open themselves up to persuasion and emotional pitches.
§ Business buyer can learn about and buy products and services without waiting for and tying time with salespeople.
§ It provides buyers with greater product access and selection.
§ Beyond a broader selection of sellers and products-commerce channels also give buyers access to a wealth of comparative information, information about companies, products and competitors.
§ Good sites often provide more information in more useful forms than even the most solicitous sales person can. for example Amazon.com offer top-10 product list, extensive product descriptions, expert and user product reviews and recommendations based on customer's previous purchases.
§ Online buying is interactive and immediate. Buyers often can interact with the seller's sits to create exactly the configuration of information of products, or services, they desire. Then order or download them on the spot.
§ Internet gives consumers a greater measure of control. Like nothing else before it. The internet has empowered consumers.
Challenges of E Business
The new millennium brought with it new possibilities in terms of informationaccess and availability, simultaneously introducing new challenges in protectingsensitive information from some eyes while making it available to others. TheInternet allows businesses to use information more effectively, by allowingcustomers, suppliers, employees, and partners to get access to the businessinformation they need, when they need it. These Internet-enabled services alltranslate to reduced cost: there are less overhead, greater economies of scale, andincreased efficiency. E-business' greatest promise is more timely, more valuableinformation accessible to more people, at reduced cost of information access.
The needs of e-business security
While putting business systems on the Internet offers potentially unlimitedopportunities for increasing efficiency and reducing cost, it also offers potentially unlimited risk. The Internet provides much greater access to data, and to morevaluable data, not only to legitimate users, but also to hackers, disgruntledemployees, criminals, and corporate spies.
Scalability With Large User Communities
The sheer size of the user communities which can access business systems via theInternet not only increases the risk to those systems, it also constrains thesolutions which can be deployed to address that risk. The Internet createschallenges in terms of scalability of security mechanisms, management of thosemechanisms, and the need to make them standard and interoperable.
Security mechanisms for Internet-enabled systems must support much largercommunities of users than systems that are not Internet-enabled. Whereas thelargest traditional enterprise systems typically supported thousands of users, manyInternet-enabled systems have millions of users.
Manageability
Traditional mechanisms for identifying users and managing their access, such asgranting each user an account and password on each system he accesses, may notbe practical in an Internet environment. It rapidly becomes too difficult andexpensive for system administrators to manage separate accounts for each user onevery system.
Interoperability
Unlike traditional enterprise systems, where a company owns and controls allcomponents of the system, Internet-enabled e-business systems must exchangedata with systems owned and controlled by others: customers, suppliers, partnersetc. Security mechanisms deployed in e-business systems must therefore bestandards based, flexible, and interoperable, to ensure that they work with others'systems. They must support browsers, and work in multi-tier architectures withone or more middle tiers such as web servers and application servers.
Hosted Systems and Exchanges
The principal security challenge of hosting is keeping data from different hosteduser communities separate. The simplest way of doing this is to create physicallyseparate systems for each hosted community. The disadvantage of this approach isthat it requires a separate computer, with separately installed, managed, and configured software, for each hosted user community, providing little economiesof scale to a hosting company. Mechanisms that allow multiple different usercommunities to share a single hardware and software instance, keep data fordifferent user communities separate, and allow a single administrative interfacefor the hosting provider, can greatly reduce costs for the hosting service provider.
E-business depends on providing customers, partners, and employees with access to information, in a way that is controlled and secure. Managing e-businesssecurity is a multifaceted challenge and requires the coordination of businesspolicy and practice with appropriate technology. In addition to deployingstandards bases, flexible and interoperable systems, the technology must provideassurance of the security provided in the products.
As technology matures and secure e-business systems are deployed, companieswill be better positioned to manage the risks associated with disintermediation ofdata access. Through this process businesses will enhance their competitive edgewhile also working to protect critical business infrastructures from malefactorslike hackers, disgruntled employees, criminals and corporate spies.
Why E-business needs E-technology
Technologies perform three vital roles in business firms. That is, they support an organization's business operations, managerial decision making and strategic advantage. Information technology has also become an indispensable ingredient in several major business strategies that businesses are implementing to meet the challenges of rapidly changing business environment. These include internet working the enterprise, globalization, business process reengineering, and using information technology for strategic competitive advantage.
What Technologies are Necessary for E- Business?
Online Transaction Processing Systems play a strategic role in E-business. Many firms are using the internet, extranet, and other networks that tie them electronically to their customers or suppliers for online transaction processing (OLTP). Such real time systems which capture transaction and process transactions immediately can help them provide superior service to customers and other trading partners.
EFT(electronic fund transfer) systems are major form of electronic payment systems in banking and retailing industries. EFT systems use a variety of information technologies to capture and process money and credit transfers between banks and businesses and their customers.
Intranet applications of companies have demonstrated impressive returns, quick payback, and other strategic benefits. Major cost saving come from replacing company publications and documents on paper with electronic multimedia versions published to web servers.
Extranet primary role is to link the internet resources of a company to the intranets of its customers, suppliers, and other business partners. Thus, extranet provide significant business value by facilitating and strengthening the business relationships of a company with customers and suppliers, improving collaboration with its business partners, and enabling the development of new kinds of web-based service for its customers, suppliers and others.
Conclusion
Having analyzed traditional approaches to e-business and current examples of online business process automation, the remainder of this paper discusses ideas to extend e-business beyond tomorrow. In particular, as well as building on the aspects of community, responsibility transfer, and whole-supply-chain automation, it incorporates a number of specific advanced principles:
Widening of communities to indirect parties
Deepening of communities to build trust-based e-business relationships
Symmetrical responsibility design
Policy-driven e-business
Autonomous management within communities
Knowledge-directed data sharing
Tags & Keywords : E- Business, E- Commerce, E- Technology
| Amina Mushtaq |
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