The e-Business Challenge

In today’s business climate, e-Business can have an impact on every facet of the organization, including processes, applications, staffing, infrastructure, relationships, sales, and sales channels. Not only is e- Business transforming companies and industries, it’s doing so at an accelerating rate. Business cycles that use to be measured in years are now measured in days. Competition in the future, even today in certain industries, will not be company against company but supply chain against supply chain. Companies will be only as strong as the weakest link in their supply chain. The winners will be companies that can build up, or tear down, electronic B2B relationships rapidly and seamlessly.

As part of this transformation, enterprise borders are starting to disappear. e-Business is all about providing open access to infrastructure services, data, and applications. Partners, suppliers, customers and, in some cases, even your competition (or co-opetition) will be able to peer into your corporate nervous system.

Hopefully, all of this will be for the better. But, if not handled correctly, sometimes it may be for the worse. Customer expectations are rising mercilessly in terms of the speed and reliability they expect from your e-Business applications. Studies show that Web customers will wait only eight seconds for a page view, even if they are on a slow connection that you have no control over. Not only are your external customer’s expectations rising but so are the expectations of your internal customers. They can’t watch the news or read an airline magazine without being reminded about what is possible in e-Business.

As a result, they are clamoring for the functionality that e-Business provides, asking you to take the business “from brick-and-mortar to clickand- mortar.” And application developers may be pushing to develop online systems that involve users outside your organization, and that connect to the external systems of your business partners.