Management responses to e-commerce and e-business

A primary aim of this book is to consider the management issues when businesses look to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by e-commerce and e-business. How should an e-business strategy be developed? To what extent can we use existing business and IS strat­egy models? What are the main changes that need to be made to the organization as part of implementing the strategy? These issues are explored in more detail in Part 2. Before we can develop e-business strategy a foundation is needed. This is provided in Part 1 of the book.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 1 describes the background to e-business as follows:

• Chapter 1: Introduction to e-business and e-commerce. Definition of the meaning and scope of e-business and e-commerce. Introduction to business use of the Internet – what are the benefits and barriers to adoption and how widely used is it?
• Chapter 2: E-commerce fundamentals. Introduction to new business models and market­place structures enabled by electronic communications.
• Chapter 3: E-business infrastructure. Background on the hardware, software and telecom­munications that need to be managed to achieve e-business.
• Chapter 4: E-environment. Describes the macro-environment of an organization that pres­ents opportunities for and constraints on strategy and implementation.

Part 2: Strategy and applications

In Part 2 of the book approaches to developing e-business strategy are covered by reviewing how e-business strategy and applications should be developed for the organization as a whole (Chapter 5) and with an emphasis on the buy-side (Chapters 6 and 7) and the sell-side (Chapters 7and 8).

• Chapter 5: E-business strategy. Approaches to developing e-business strategy. Differences from traditional strategic approaches. Relation to IS strategy.
• Chapter 6: Supply chain management. A supply chain perspective on strategy with examples of how technology can be applied to increase supply chain and value chain efficiency.
• Chapter 7: E-procurement. Evaluation of the benefits of adopting e-procurement.
• Chapter 8: E-marketing. A sell-side e-commerce perspective to e-business reviewing differ­ences in marketing required through digital media.
• Chapter 9: Customer relationship management. Using e-commerce as part of acquiring, retaining and extending the range of products sold to customers.

Here we introduce some of the strategy issues involved with e-business using the classic McKinsey 7S strategy instrument (Waterman et al., 1980). This is summarized in diagram­matic form in Figure 1.15 and in table form in Table 1.5 to highlight some aspects that need to be managed when developing an e-business strategy and that are covered in this text (Activity 1.5).

Part 3: Implementation

E-business management is described in Part 3 of the book where we examine practical man­agement issues involved with creating and implementing e-business solutions.

• Chapter 10: Change management. How to manage the organizational, human and tech­nology change required in the move to e-business.
• Chapter 11: Analysis and design. We discuss the main issues of analysis and design raised by e-commerce systems that need to be discussed by managers and solutions providers.
• Chapter 12: Implementation and maintenance. How should e-commerce systems be managed and monitored once they are live?

To complete this chapter, read Case Study 1.3 for the background on the success factors

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).