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

Kalakota, Ravi; Robinson, Marcia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201604809 ISBN 13: 9780201604801

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 1999

Synopsis

Surveys how some successful companies have redesigned their structure and practices to do business on the Internet, and glean from them fundamental design principles for building an electronic business blueprint. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

Review

To the uninitiated, e-business refers solely to the process of buying and selling goods over the Net. In our increasingly interactive age, however, it actually means much more. e-Business: Roadmap for Success, by Ravi Kalakota and Marcia Robinson, defines the term as "the complex fusion of business processes, enterprise applications and organizational structure necessary to create a high-performance business model." Kalakota and Robinson--specialists in the field who serve as founder-CEO and president, respectively, of a company called e-Business Strategies--show how to employ its tenets to compete more effectively in today's brave new world. Aiming at managers who recognize the need to plan and implement just such a course of action, the authors (with help from some pioneers currently practicing these techniques) offer solid advice for designing interrelated strategies focused on customer relationships, resource planning, order management, and supply chains, and on evaluating investments needed to make them a reality. Describing efforts undertaken by successful e-businesses such as Charles Schwab, which adopted a system that provides sales reps with real-time access to information on customers and appropriate new products, the two chart the course that trailblazing companies are following and savvy business people would be wise to emulate. --Howard Rothman

From the Inside Flap

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 needs. Each chapter ends with a "Memo to the CEO" that provides a set of normative questions that must be answered convincingly if the building blocks of strategic integration are to be constructed effectively and profitably.

The last two chapters are prescriptive. They focus on the challenges of moving your organization to an e-business firm. In today's business environment, the stakes are high and failure is swift and ruthless. How an organization mobilizes itself into constructive action will determine its survival and ultimate success. Acknowledgments

Since this book contains information on many companies struggling with their e-business initiatives, we would like to thank them all for their hard work as they continue to tackle this tough issue.

We have learned much through our consulting engagements and extend thanks to the many people we have talked to. In particular, Kemal Koeksal and Peter Zencke at SAP, Shirish Netke at Sun Microsystems, Alex Lowy and David Ticoll at the Alliance for Converging Technologies, Angela Schwartz at Microsoft, and Nagesh Vempaty at Healtheon Corporation.

Thanks to the many people at Addison-Wesley who made this book possible, in particular, our editors Elizabeth Spainhour and Mary O'Brien. Many thanks to our reviewers, who took time out of their bu

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0201604809
• ISBN 13: 9780201604801
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 378