E-Business

E-Business

Task 1

Before we can define e-business, we must first take a closer look at E-Commerce (EC). EC is an emerging concept that describes the process of buying, selling, or exchanging product, services, information, and payment via a computer networks, including the Internet. Now that we understand how e-business was derived, we can now define e-business.

E-business refers to a broader definition of EC, not just the buying a selling of goods and services, but also servicing customers, collaborating with business partners, and conducting electronic transaction within an organization. According to Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO, "E-business is all about time cycle, speed, globalization, enhanced productivity, reaching new customers and sharing knowledge across institution for competitive advantage.

There are two types of EC, Pure and Partial and they can take many forms depending of the degree of digitization of (1) the product or services sold; (2) the process and (3) the delivery agent or intermediary. Some types of activities and features made possible by e-business:

Businesses operate today in a diverse environment. They interact with a wide variety of clients, both inside and outside of the enterprise, and they rely on disparate systems and processes to power their business activities. In this kind of environment, businesses face an integration challenge (RAY 2003). To fully maximize their resources, businesses strive to bring together their internal systems and processes to gain operational efficiency, and they strive to extend those systems and processes to their trading partners to increase revenue.

Revenues are increase through e-market (venue) also referred to as e-marketplace or e-marketspace, which is a vehicle for conducting business online. These e-markets allow customers to perform activities such as electronic exchange with features like dynamic pricing.

Task 2

Other feature of e-business includes interorganizational information systems (ISO), which involves the flow of information among two or more organizations. IOS objective is the efficient transaction processing, such as transmitting orders, bills and payments using EDI Internet or extranets. IOS are used exclusively for B2B applications, mostly supply-chain related, whereas electronic markets exist in both B2B and B2C cases.

In recent years, the book industry evolved from the mom and pap's stores to the big corporate giants like Borders and Barns and Nobles. But with the move to the electronic age, the book industry was blind sided by new player like amazon.com. The entry of amazon.com into the book industry forced many of the bookstore giants to enter in to e-business. Barns and Nobles lunched an e-business web site in order to compete directly with amazon.com.

Brick-and-mortar organizations are referred to as pure physical organizations, whereas pure EC organizations are referred to as virtual corporations. Brick-and-mortar customers are customers who preferred to see and touch their product before making a purchase. These customers are usually the last ones to change over to online transaction. Although, there are very few purely physical industry these days with the exception of the physical body care industries such as the hair styling and body care industries (BRIGGS and HOLLIS 2007). However, many click-and-mortar organizations are setting up brick-and-mortar operations ...