Enabling eBusiness: Integrating Technologies, Architectures and Applications - Softcover

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W. S. Whyte is the author of Enabling eBusiness: Integrating Technologies, Architectures and Applications, published by Wiley.

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Enabling eBusiness describes the architecture and components for a comprehensive and robust eBusiness infrastructure. W.S. Whyte introduces the technical possibilities and issues in and around eBusiness and relates them to established business theory.

Looking at the entire supply chain - from supplier to customer - the book includes logistics, customer service, B2B operations, marketing and a lot more.

Enabling eBusiness helps technical and functional team leaders and strategists to get to grips with the requirements for distributed systems and on-line retailing. It is recommended reading for final year and postgraduate students in telecommunications, computer science, electrical engineering and business school courses.

Here you'll find the answers to these questions - and more:
* How can you "seduce" customers into buying on-line?
* How do you get customers to trust you?
* What is database marketing?
* How do you make payment secure?

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Enabling eBusiness describes the architecture and components for a comprehensive and robust eBusiness infrastructure. W.S. Whyte introduces the technical possibilities and issues in and around eBusiness and relates them to established business theory.

Looking at the entire supply chain - from supplier to customer - the book includes logistics, customer service, B2B operations, marketing and a lot more.

Enabling eBusiness helps technical and functional team leaders and strategists to get to grips with the requirements for distributed systems and on-line retailing. It is recommended reading for final year and postgraduate students in telecommunications, computer science, electrical engineering and business school courses.

Here you'll find the answers to these questions - and more:
* How can you "seduce" customers into buying on-line?
* How do you get customers to trust you?
* What is database marketing?
* How do you make payment secure?

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INTRODUCTION

Introduction to the e-business

E-business is a technical issue. The needs of enterprises and the desires of customers have not changed. Profitability remains as the difference between income and costs. But, solely because of technology, major new opportunities for revenue growth and in avoidance of expense have become feasible. E- business has happened entirely because of a conjunction of improvements in technologies and has yet to reach full speed and realise its potential. These technologies are, at the highest level, only two in number: more powerful computers and faster communication links.

Replacing the physical store by its virtual equivalent will mean that dramatic reduction in cost of real estate can be achieved and the saving invested on creating new e-shops to increase revenue within a global market. In a competitive world, new costs will also be incurred. To handle the increased volume of business or to meet increased customer expectation, these on-line outlets must be backed up by on- line customer service operations which are available on 24hour/7day terms and these must be integrated with slicker, electronically assisted supply and fulfilment operations.

With this integration in place, it may no longer be necessary, or necessarily desirable, for any one company to do every thing to 'get the melon to the customer'. Instead, a number of different companies will be able to work together in a virtual enterprise, provided information can be interchanged effectively and securely.

'E-business' and 'e-commerce'

E-business is a broader and more easily defined term than the commonly used E-commerce. The latter is sometimes used narrowly to refer to 'shopping on the Intemet' but also in a much broader context to include virtually every electronic trading and support activity a business can undertake. In this book we use the term c-commerce rather informally to refer to a middle position, that of retailing, principally shopping. We do not restrict the delivery channel for these services to that of the Internet, since there are other channels, of which digital interactive TV and WAP mobile telephony are only two of the examples we shall cover. We shall also use terms such as electronic retailing, on-line shopping/retailing and electronic merchants, more or less as synonyms. Again note that 'on-line' does not necessarily mean 'Intemet' and, in the case of TV and mobile radio, the 'line' is conceptual rather than real.

Where the range of activities is extended to cover such areas as logistics, marketing intelligence- gathering, collaborative working and so on, we prefer to use the term e-business. Sometimes when we want to emphasise the fact that access to the organisation is mainly via communications network, we shall use the term virtual business. Where the business units and their electronic processes operate across a number of geographically separated sites, we shall talk about distributed business. If the conditions are such that a number of legally distinct trading entities set up systems that allow them to co-operate across distance, then we call this a virtual enterprise.

Basic technologies

We said that there were only two base-level technologies involved in supporting the e-business explosion: computing and communications. But it is reasonable to point out that these have been around for some decades and to ask why they should suddenly have become the engines of dramatic change. The answer is simple: both of them have quite recently 'turned the exponential' in terms of performance and reduction in cost. It is now well-known that performance per dollar in computing systems doubles every 18 months or so, has been doing so for two decades, and is likely to continue to do so for at least 15 years. By the end of this period, computers will be more than one thousand times as powerful as today's machines, for the same price. A similar trend in telecommunications is happening. Twenty years ago, a single, heavy, rigid, expensive to install and maintain coaxial cable could carry a maximum of around 10,000 voice telephone calls or their equivalent in data over a few kilometres. Today, operational systems using individual tiny, flexible optical fibre carry orders of magnitude more, over intercontinental distances. Systems in the laboratory can carry many times more traffic on a single fibre than exists in the world today. The drop in cost is truly dramatic and we are only at the start. The message for business is simple: within a couple of decades, they will have wide access to affordable networks of effectively infinite carrying capacity and to computers with almost unimaginable processing power, and they must plan on this assumption.

Opportunities (and threats)

The technology developments we have described open up enormous opportunities to businesses and, equally, will enable grave competitive threats:

· Geographical freedom: certain parts of a trading organisation are freed from the tyranny of location. An on-line shop-window exists only in 'cyberspace' and is not constrained by rent or availability of real estate. Customers can come from anywhere ~ which is an advantage and a disadvantage. Trading globally certainly increases potential market size (perhaps particularly for products which would otherwise be niche) but it increases the complexity of product nativization, rules and regulations, language and, perhaps most importantly, how to deliver the goods. There is, in short, a major impact on the complexity of marketing and logistics. That is, e-business requires better integration of back-office processes.

· But no hiding-place: geographical freedom comes, not just to the vendor, but also to the customer. Customers have the ability to access shop-windows anywhere in the world and, provided the vendor can meet the fulfilment requirements, decide to purchase elsewhere than from their traditional supplier. This puts cost and quality of service pressure on the traditional vendor. It may also give rise to a new breed of organisations which can provide broker functions between multiple suppliers and customers, broking on availability, price, interpretation of requirements and specifications .