2. E-Business or E-Commerce

It won't be long before the "E" in E-Business is gone. It's inevitable. Electronic business will evolve to such an extent, and its impact on business will be so pervasive, there will be no further need to distinguish between the two.

E-Business is remaking the business world by:

	Redefining virtually every business process and function.
	Changing conventional concepts and rules about strategic alliances, outsourcing, competition,                                industry specialization, and customer relationships.
	Creating a wealth of information about customers, enabling businesses to anticipate and satisfy                                individual needs with pinpoint precision.
	Blurring the lines between industries.
	Challenging every business to reinvent itself.

A deputy global E-Business practice leader for a global consulting firm, looks up and down the value chain: "Ultimately," she says, "E-Business will change the definition of "industry" and recast the relationships between businesses."

"It's important to recognize how truly different E-Business is from any other development of our time. Everything that has gone before it has eventually become obsolete.

"E-Business is just the opposite. This time, users will be rendered obsolete if they do not run fast and hard to utilize the new capabilities E-Business delivers."

How will this happen? The mass migration to an E-Business model will occur in stages. Some companies have already moved well beyond the first stage—establishing an Internet presence or channel—and they are now actively integrating and connecting the buying and selling processes of their Websites into back office, customer, and marketing systems.

In the next stage, Web capabilities are actively integrated throughout the value chain. Here, customers and suppliers work together to build on-line value chains that improve service and reduce costs.

In the final stages, businesses of all kinds will converge electronically to combine their expertise and provide packaged services. They will push the edge of their current E-Business capabilities to transform their strategies, organizations, processes, and systems so that they can better meet the needs of their customers. The focus here is on building trust.

When this comes about, the boundaries between industries will start to disappear. Companies will un-bundle operations and retain only those critical to their market positions. Cross-industry value chains will come together to create networked organizations and markets.

E-Business is an unstoppable, epoch-making idea. Very soon, the name for E-Business is likely to be: business

 

                                                

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