The Authors - Mohan Sawhney is a professor at Kellog Graduate School and Jeff Zabin is an independant writer.
The
book is all about the E-Business revolution and how organizations need to evolve strategy to move to E-Business. The authors say that within a short time, the E in E-Business will dissappear...
Meaning all business will be E-Business. E will stand for "Enhanced" or "Everyday". E-Business is much more than E-Commerce. E-Commerce is just buy or sell, whereas E-Business
Communicates, learns, colloborates, makes, innovates, plans and recruits. Transformation to E-Business is a must if organizations need to survive in this competitive world. When an
organization tries to evolve it's E-Biz strategy, it has to look at 4 angles where it will be benefited:
Cost Reduction
Revenue Expansion
Time reduction
Relationship enhancement
The author's make it very clear that
don't just enter the band wagon !. Decide what is your business objective and use E-Business as another channel to achieve it. The author's dispel the notion that E-Business is only about Internet. Internet is only a part of the revolution. The book is organized into 7 sections, or journey towards the path of Nirvana
E-Vision
E-volution
E-Strategy
E-
Synchronization E-Infrastructure
E-Capitalization
E-Organization
E-Vision : A famous quote goes ..We don't do different things. We do things differently!. This book however makes the point that you have to do different things or else how will you beat the competition? E-Business is not tied to any particular department like Finance or HR. It is entity based - i.e supplier centric or customer centric. That is the vision you should have
E-volution : Software developers would know the spiral model of development. The actual E-Biz evolution is also similar to that. The E-Biz structure should evolve from iterations and enhancement based on feedback. We have to look at strengthening all chains,
since a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. E-Strategy: The theme here is: don't start thinking in terms of hardware, software when you think of E-Biz. Think of the business perspective. That is, think like an architect, not like an Engineer. We have start thinking in terms of customer proposition rather than 3 letter acronyms like SCM, ERP or CRM.
E-Synchronization: Many people think that E-Business is all about Internet. The authors explain that this is wrong. Net is only a part of it. E-Business has to be seen from a larger perspective where Net is an enabler. We have to have external as well as internal synchronization. External synchronization is presenting a unified face to the customer. Internal synchronization is having things in order inhouse.
E-Infrastructure: Here we talk of the technology part.We have to plan for Entity facing suites like customer suites (suites like these are non-existant today) rather than function specific suites. A careful planning has to be done to predict size of usage, bandwidth etc.
E-Capitalization: In any business, the driver is ROI - Return on Investment. In today's world where Return of Investment itself is doubtful (!), Return on Investment is the important parameter. An important thing is to define properly the metrics with which you can measure the performance of the business.
E-Organization: The people factor ! The section talks of a magic word -
Shared Vision This is aligning the action of individuals towards a shared vision. In any organization, the individial goals may not perfectly match with organization goals. It is, however important that the individuals working towards a target have a common goal. It is important therefore that organizations have the answer to WIIFME (WhIt For ME) question.
As Budha said in 16th century BC, Enlightenment is
a path which opens the eyes and bestows understanding, which leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvana