eBusiness: What's Happened and What Happens Next?
Assessing Your eBusiness Performance and Potential
Many companies are in a holding pattern around eBusiness strategies and activities. Why? They're uncertain about new Web 2.0 technologies and their value to the business, about how to satisfy customers' and business partners' interest in deeper and more collaborative relationships, and about how to cope with the increasing power of the consumer to drive products and markets. Many companies see these challenges but do not see a clear path to their next stage of eBusiness.
Paul Saffo suggests two themes will be the hallmarks of Next-Stage eBusiness: complexity of systems, processes, markets, competition, and velocity of change in markets, customers and customer expectations, technologies, and of a company's ability to respond to those changes. Next-Stage eBusiness will be based on relentless experimentation and innovation, using more data than ever and ever more powerful and sophisticated analytics. Next-Stage eBusiness will rely on service-based business models and service-oriented technology architectures to enable rapid combination, revision, and scaling of information systems and other business components.
Next-Stage eBusiness is distinguished from earlier eBusiness applications and ambitions by three characteristics:
- Seamless integration of the digital and physical worlds. Products and services flow into and out of both digital and physical worlds. For example, General Motors' OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics, available free for most GM vehicles from 2004 on, emails owners once a month with a diagnostic report of the vehicle, along with account information. The owner simply pushes the blue OnStar button to enroll or does so online. Owners can also request an on-demand diagnosis.
- Leveraging collaboration. Next-Stage eBusiness is all about collaboration - about enabling people inside and outside the company to do things together easily. Collaboration objectives can vary, so the tools and technologies that support collaboration must be current and easily accessible. While electronic collaboration is not new, it has rapidly become central to the expectation of customers, employees, and business partners.
- Always on, demand-ready, and connected. Millions of people depend on, and expect, Google to be there available to work for them all the time. They have the same expectations of eBusiness, whether that seems fair or not. In the first stage of eBusiness, companies were pushing out, or allowing access to, their information. Today customers and employees demand a new level of flexibility and capability to easily connect with companies when and how they want to. Companies still need to push information, but they also need to accept that recipients now define what they want, when, and how.
This Re.sults report presents a short history of eBusiness and examines the current challenges companies face in preparing for Next-Stage eBusiness. It discusses and explains, with examples, the principal characteristics, enablers, and recommendations for success in Next-Stage eBusiness.