E-Business: Basics and Challenges

The paper first gives an overview of the foundations of e-business. This is accomplished by specifying and differentiating e-business. In addition to this, the spectrum of e-business is outlined. Some reasoning is dedicated to the relevance of e-business in terms of performance potential, range of applications, innovation and implementation. The second part of the paper deals with the critical determinants of successful e-business. Challenges to e-business are related to strengthening success factors, establishing barriers to failure, diminishing barriers to success and fighting failure factors. The paper concludes with an outlook on challenges in the implementation process. 1. BASICS OF E-BUSINESS 1.1 Specification of e-business E-business represents a major trend in management, comparable to important business trends like supply chain management, leasing, non-cash payment, mail order commerce or the rise of the service economy. In IT-management e-business can be compared to trends like Enterprise Resource Planning or client-server architecture. E-business primarily stands for internet enabled business. The enabling process is based upon application of internet technologies (Intranets, Extranets) and related standards (HTTP, HTML, XML, CORBA, etc.). It covers several levels (see figure 1). The non-interactive information level serves as a platform for three levels of web-enabled interactions.