E-Business: Roadmap for Success
Preface
Managers everywhere are feeling the heat: Their companies are at the e-commerce crossroads and there are many ways to go. But which road will lead to success? What are the roadblocks they will be forced to navigate? Which business models, management strategies and tactics will make them successful? What will be the characteristics of the next generation of business applications and which vendors will lead in delivering them? And whom can they turn to for help?
If these are the questions you're losing sleep over, you've picked up the right book. We'll help you find the road to take. E-Business: Roadmap for Success tackles the nagging questions:
- Why are some companies successful at e-commerce while others flounder?
- What are businesses that are succeeding doing differently?
- How are successful companies transitioning from "traditional" apps to the "new breed," integrated e-business architecture?
We won't just show you opportunities. We'll show you how to capitalize on them. Through detailed case studies of some of the best-known companies, this book examines the e-business blueprint, offering step-by-step guidance in choosing and implementing the right strategies to survive and succeed in the e-commerce onslaught.
Moving From e-Commerce to e-Business
E-commerce is here to stay. As we approach the new millennium, the Web and e-commerce are key industry drivers. Few companies or industries are immune from the effects of the e-commerce tidal wave. It's changed how many companies do business. It's created new channels for our customers, making leaders in many different industries sit up and take notice.
Are you e-commerce ready? Managers of established companies are struggling to comprehend this new phenomenon. And just as many have started to grasp e-commerce, the next wave - e-business - is already knocking on the door. Intensified competition and new e-commerce opportunities are pressing traditional companies to build e-business models that are flexible, fast moving and customer-focused. In other words, the core of the enterprise itself is going through a metamorphosis. The next stage of this structural evolution is e-business.
Are you e-business savvy? E-business is the complex fusion of business processes, enterprise applications and organization structure necessary to create a high-performance business model. The message is simple: Without transitioning to an e-business foundation, e-commerce cannot be executed effectively. Considering the inevitability of moving toward an e-business foundation, senior management is being galvanized into tactical action. Those who fail will pay a high price.
If managers seriously want to develop effective strategies for competing in the new economy, they must understand the fundamental structure of the next generation e-corporation built on an inter-connected web of enterprise applications. We wrote this book to provide a master blueprint for building an innovative e-corporation that can survive and thrive in the digital world.
What Makes This Book Different?
Many books have been written about how the old economic rules of scale, scope, efficiency, market share, and vertical integration are no longer sufficient. New rules must be applied, and that requires new organizational capabilities. Managers everywhere understand the urgency; they're itching to get going and make change happen.
Unfortunately, the first generation of e-commerce strategy books is long on vision but short on detail. Many IT organizations know it's easy to talk about the e-commerce future, but the real management challenge is to make it happen in a systematic way without derailing the existing business. What does this mean to a CEO, CFO and CIO? If customers are moving online, then the whole IT investment paradigm must shift toward creating an integrated e-business model.
The focus of this book is practical: How can senior management plan for and manage e-business investments? The first step is to design a comprehensive e-commerce strategy, then evaluate prospective line-of-business (LOB) application framework investments based on how well the technology or application advances the strategy. Companies often make the mistake of focusing first on e-commerce applications and then trying to bend a legacy IT strategy around this outline afterward. To succeed, managers must have a strong e-business strategy in place before considering specific e-commerce application investments. Otherwise, most e-commerce efforts are doomed to fail.
But what do these internal e-business architecture and investments look like? This is the focus of E-Business: Roadmap for Success. It's the first primer on e-business that looks at the structural migration problem: How to move an old company into a new agile e-corporation? It provides a unique view of the next-generation, integrated enterprise and the LOB application investments necessary to compete. In this book, we share the critical elements - business processes, back office and front office applications and strategy - managers need to know to be successful in the digital economy.
In other words, corporations involved in e-commerce must re-think their IT visions of the future. E-Business: Roadmap for Success shows that understanding how to lead one's company into the e-commerce arena requires a new point of view about integration and the business design. It offers step-by-step navigation of the uncharted e-business terrain. This is a guide executives in the Fortune 2000 companies need to succeed in the information economy.
Who Should Read This Book?
E-business will play a significant role in determining the success of corporations. Management needs to learn that the real challenge surrounding e-business is the task of making it happen. This book focuses on the business architecture that managers must build in order to achieve e-business success.
Virtually every discipline is impacted by e-commerce and e-business architectural efforts! This book's timeliness and insights into the changes in organization practice make it appealing to a broad management market:
- Senior management and strategic planners who are charged with developing business strategies;
- Corporate executives who must drive their companies' visions of the future;
- Information technology managers who need to lead their teams with strategic decisions.
This is a must-read for all managers, consultants, entrepreneurs and business school students who have been discussing and reading about e-commerce and are interested in knowing how they can capitalize on e-dynamics.
How This Book Is Organized
Building the foundation for the era of e-commerce is very exciting! The first four chapters describe a new e-business model composed of building blocks called "enterprise applications." Market leaders are developing a set of intertwined enterprise applications - best customer relationship solutions, best ERP systems, best order management solutions, or best supply chain solutions - then building their organizations around it. Each enterprise application demands a distinct strategic fusion of customer-centric processes, information systems, management systems and culture.
Most managers are apprehensive of tackling strategic fusion issues because they represent such a formidable task that transcends the organizational structure and line-of-business considerations. This book offers a way to structure this widespread strategy problem, slice it into manageable pieces, and create actionable plans that can be executed quickly.
Chapters five through 10 explore the various e-business design elements in the new e-corporation. The goal is to identify clear, rational strategic design choices that are responsive to evolving customer needs. Each chapter ends with a "Manager's Roadmap" that provides a set of normative questions that must be answered convincingly if the building blocks of strategic integration are to be built effectively and profitably.
The last two chapters are prescriptive. They focus on the challenges of moving your organization to an e-business firm. In today's business environment, the stakes are high and failure is swift and ruthless. How an organization mobilizes itself into constructive action will determine its survival and ultimate success. |
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