E-BUSINESS STRATEGY AND MANAGEMENT

E-business Strategy and Management

E-business Strategy and Management

Introduction to Strategy

NBC is a small building suppliers business based in a rural area of the United Kingdom. It specializes in sales of building materials and home appliances for residential customers and the trade customer. It has recently undergone massive expansion by acquiring by nine smaller stores, to add to the one large store it currently operates.

NBC now has ten retail outlets, a large central one and nine smaller outlets based between 3o and 8o miles from each one. The central store houses the head office staff, a large distribution stock centre (around 90,000 items) and a shop where customers can place the orders or buy items (Gordijn, 2001).

Introduction to E-Commerce and E-Business

The Business Environment

The adoption of e-business requires a holistic business strategy as well as judicious combination of new and old technologies (Castro, 2002). Some enterprises will have the expertise in house to address e-business solutions, while others will require the assistance of external consultants. Success in the application of e-business technology cannot be attained without a strategy, regardless of whether these resources are internal or external. An e-business service may be built using pre-existing programs, whose original designer may not have known about this particular purpose (Davidson, 2002).

NBC contractor establish relationships with a number of suppliers for managing its supply chain. In this environment, the most probable path is adoption through internal projects rst to limit the risk. Some enterprises may need to integrate their internal applications, which could be used as a starting point to build e-business experience. Another potential fertile ground for internal projects is application integration projects stemming from merger and acquisitions or from corporate downsizing. Significant experimentation by a construction enterprise, at least for internal projects, is expected because of the potential for increasing returns (Cutler, 2000).

In Figure 2, NBC contractor is interested in enabling its existing legacy applications to conform to ebXML standards. Initially the contractor downloads from the ebXML repository the ebXML specifications (business processes and scenarios). Then the contractor determines which business processes best fit the needs of their business. This means that the contractor can implement only a subset of the business processes that they engage. If the contractor does not find the business processes defined in the specifications, they can modify an existing business process. Once, the contractor has determined the business processes it can support, it can start developing an application to support the understood ebXML standards. This application defines the service interface that other business partners can invoke. It also describes the input and output messages (orders, invoices, quotations) that will be given to the service. The contractor has an Internal Legacy Integrated Application, so all they have to do is to create an implementation wrapper around their Legacy Application to help understand the ebXML messages (Cox, 1998).

Once these interfaces have been built and all the detail necessary for the other organization to invoke the contractor's services is available, all this has to be packaged in what is ...