e-Business: Roadmap for Success (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marcia Robinson is the cofounder and president of e-Business Strategies. She has extensive experience in the service delivery and customer side of e-business for the financial services industry.

Dr. Ravi Kalakota is a pioneer in the area of e-commerce. He is the CEO of e-Business Strategies, a technology research and consulting practice, and has consulted extensively with start-ups and Fortune 1000 companies.

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As e-commerce solutions, enterprise applications, and business models converge in new ways, a tidal wave of change is transforming industries, redefining competitive strategies, and annihilating traditional thinking. To survive and thrive in the e-commerce world, all companies--from established industry leaders to feisty upstarts--are remaking themselves into lean, mean e-business machines that serve, delight, and retain customers better than ever before.

How do they do it? Not with new products or innovative technology, but with superior e-business designs. Startups like Amazon.com and some nimble incumbents, such as Cisco, have each created an e-business design by which they serve customers, differentiate their supply chains, integrate their selling chains, procure products, and nurture relationships.

e-Business: Roadmap for Success illustrates how managers are rewiring the enterprise to confront the e-commerce onslaught--uprooting traditional business applications as we know them. The authors create an innovative application framework for structural migration from a legacy model to an e-business model. Drawing on their experience with and research of leading businesses, Kalakota and Robinson identify the fundamental design principles for building the e-business blueprint.

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e-Business: Roadmap for Success Ravi Kalakota and Marcia Robinson Information Technology Series Preface

e-Commerce is changing the shape of competition, the speed of action and the nature of leadership.

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 to whom can they turn 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 solving customer problems doing differently? * How are successful companies moving from traditional applications to the new breed of integrated e-business architectures?

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 the e-commerce onslaught and succeed.

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 to 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 reaching the shore. 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 organizational structure necessary to create a high-performance business model. The message is simple: Without a transition 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 interconnected 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 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 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 architectures and investments look like? This is the focus of e-Business: Roadmap for Success.It's the first book on e-business that looks at the structural migration problem: how to transform 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 highlight the critical elements--business processes, back-office and front-office applications, and strategy--that managers need to be successful in the digital economy.

In other words, corporations involved in e-commerce must rethink their 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 that 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 affected by e-commerce and e-business architectural efforts. This book's timeliness and insights into the changes in organizational 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' competitive future * Information technology managers who need to lead their teams with strategic decisions

This book 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 design composed of building blocks called enterprise applications. Market leaders are developing intricate e-models resting on a set of intertwined enterprise apps--customer relationship solutions, enterprise resource planning systems, order management solutions, or supply chain solutions--and then building their strategies around it. Each enterprise app 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 5 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...