Developing e-business; a strategic approach

While e-business is often mixed with electronic commerce (e-commerce), they are completely different concepts. E-business encompasses e-commerce as well as many other applications. There are more benefits to be derived from e-business than from e-commerce. Electronic business (e-business) is revolutionizing the way of communication between internal and external stakeholders within an organization. Connecting numerous information systems and integrating data streams can significantly increase the operational efficiency of the firm. E-business can lead to competitive advantage as well as profitability. (Follit, 2000). This improved relationship causes increased loyalty, and then results in increased profits and a competitive advantage for the firm. E-business functions E-business provides links to customers, suppliers, business partners, and employees through the Internet, intranets, and extranets. Web systems handle transactions for customers and also provide them e-commerce services. Intranets and Web portals are used to link employees so they can have access to more information. Intranets are commonly used for transactional and interactive processes and information sharing purposes. The increased data availability improves corporate productivity. Information flowing to and from business partners is facilitated through the growth and improvement of extranets. Extranets allow more and more firms to implement e-business solutions. The suppliers of a firm are also linked to their customers through these extranets. This allows for logistics improvements such as systems interconnection, production streamlining, and automatic material order. The integration of logistics is commonly referred to as supply chain management. E-business components With the expanded functionality, e-business has gradually increased its complexity. It is evidenced by the problems occurring at dotcoms during the holiday season, such as Toys-R-Us (Bury, 2000). E-business sites were originally focused on their customers. Expanded e-business applications are expected to handle other parties such as partners and suppliers, thus increasing complexity. E-business has caused a need for high-end, highly available computing platforms (Day, 1999; McGee, 2000). The increased complexity of e-business applications has made many believe that: Client/server applications are not going to do the job in the near future (Vizard, 2000). As a result, organizations may be forced to dispose of legacy systems if they wish to meet the requirements of e-business. If they decided to keep legacy systems, it is likely that they would be unable to compete in the long term because their success is tied to the efficiency of their IT infrastructure. E-business technology consists of operating systems such as Windows NT, server hardware, and management platforms scheduled to arrive in the near future. This will enable IT managers to make significant changes to their system architectures (Wagner et al., 1999). System or server consolidation has also emerged as an approach to solving these problems. Infrastructures will then become more important to managers as systems are re-engineered to become more flexible. Managers also look for scalability as they experience continuous pressure to expand hardware and software service levels (Wagner et al., 1999; Roberts and Hersch, 2000). They look for hardware and software that can handle performance scalability as well as maintaining the flexibility required to handle a mixture of workload requirements. Partitioning of architectures has been one approach to addressing these data center requirements. Also, many computer firms are striving to provide various servers that are able to handle e-business functions. Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard make servers available and IBM has just recently presented its RS/6000 S80 server, which is expected to be a large success (Garvey, 2000; Simison et al., 2000). These products are more powerful, reliable, and scalable than previous systems, thus improving the quality of e-business solutions. Organizations will have a need for alliances from their hardware, software, and service providers. As a result of the increased reliance on these systems, managers will focus closely on their infrastructure’s quality assurance and performance (Evans, 1999;