E‐business —the ultimate information opportunity
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040764 |
| Pages | 52-56 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Martin White |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
E-business -the
ultimate information
opportunity
by Martin White, Managing Director,
Intranet Focus Ltd.
E-Commerce
is
the latest boom in consumer
technology.
What are the benefits,
as
well as
the drawbacks to this development? How can
we use
it
to our advantage? This paper takes
a
detailed look
at
e-commerce
and how
it is
shaping our
future.
Introduction
Over the last couple of years consumer e-com-
merce has dominated the headlines, with scarcely a
day going by without the announcement of several
new dot.com ventures, each of which claimed that
it would change the face of consumer retailing.
Having survived the Y2K threat the dot.com
industry was looking set for 'exponential growth'
in 2000 until May 2000, when investors started to
have serious concerns about the viability of the
businesses they had given blank cheques to, and
began to vote with their share certificates. In the
UK the most visible failure was that of Boo.com,
but even Amazon has been under intense scrutiny
from the investment community about its long-
term future. What has gradually dawned on these
companies is that there are finite limits to the
product and service categories that can be sold
through an e-commerce channel.
Meanwhile another revolution has been happening,
this time in the business-to-business sector, and
that is impact that e-business is going to have on
all aspects of business. It is probably useful to
distinguish between e-commerce and e-business.
E-commerce can be regarded as electronic trading,
and at its most basic level this could be carried out
by
e-mail
alone. It does not need expensive web
sites and a great deal of investment in IT systems
and in marketing. E-business is the use of infor-
mation technology, and in particular Internet
technology standards, to create a highly flexible
and scalable platform that enables the entire
organisation to take advantage of opportunities in
the Internet markets of the future.
However there is more to it than just investing in
IT,
and the aim of this paper is to outline some of
the areas where information professionals have
considerable opportunities to develop their careers.
Market forecasts
Almost every day there seems to be a new forecast
of the likely growth in the value of business-to-
business e-commerce. Most of these have been
developed by research and consulting companies
in the USA, and it is often quite difficult from the
press comment to see if they are just forecasting
the US market, or have taken a view on global
markets. In any case the numbers are usually in
terms of billions, or even trillions of dollars.
Given how little e-commerce is actually taking
place at the present moment these forecasts are
extrapolating from the very beginning of the
adoption curve.
However the early indications are that it will be the
chemical, automotive, shipping, energy, healthcare
and aerospace markets that will be the most active
adopters of e-commerce, and we are starting to see
companies that were previously competitors now
starting to work together to develop e-business
communities.
Even with the most optimistic of forecasts it is
important to realise that these figures represent
only a fairly small percentage of the total value of
business trading, and basing a business plan on
such forecasts would not be a good idea. By the
time that this issue of VINE is published the
Department of Trade and Industry will have
published its International Benchmarking Study
2000,
which will provide comparative figures for
the extent to which companies in the UK, France,
Germany, Italy, Sweden, the USA, Canada and
Japan are actually conducting e-commerce, show-
ing the percentage of orders and payments actually
made by electronic means. This study, which
builds on the 1999 Benchmarking Study, will also
look in some detail about the comparative perform-
ance of micro, small, medium and large businesses.
The stories that make the headlines are about the
large companies, such as Cisco and Ford, but it is
important to understand the attitudes of managers
52—VINE 120
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