Chapter 1: Assessing the E-Business Opportunity

This chapter starts with an introduction to the e-business opportunity and offers a model that describes the various stages of e-business. You will see where most companies find themselves today with respect to e-business adoption and how change can be used as a competitive advantage. Then we will take a look at the IBM vision for the future of e-business, namely, e-business on demand.

The State of e-business Today

The decade of the 1990s will surely be remembered as the dawn of the Internet. We need not reiterate here the staggering statistics that describe the growth of the Internet during those years—we have all heard them by now. And we all watched the frenzied growth and subsequent collapse of the dot-com business world, which reminded us that the basic rules of business still apply—even when you add Web sites and e-mail to the picture.

The businesses of today now have an unprecedented opportunity as a direct result of the Internet phenomenon. The term "e-business" has come to stand for the huge array of Internet-related techniques and tools a business can use to move itself forward in all areas. e-business represents the "prime mover" of today's business world, offering virtually unlimited possibilities for the flexible and an inevitable downward spiral for those businesses unable or unwilling to take advantage of it. Businesses of all sizes have no choice but to change and adapt or simply fade away.

Perhaps this first decade of the new millennium will be remembered as the time when e-business grew up. While real-world e-business is no panacea, it does enable everything from simple cost savings to complete business process transformation and whole new models for reaching out to customers. There are no shortcuts for getting there, but the opportunities presented by e-business—for businesses of all sizes—have already proven to be remarkable. And we have only just begun.

As with any major change, pursuing an e-business agenda comes with risk. To borrow an analogy from the sport of baseball, ".. .you can't get to second base with your foot on first." However, in today's world... the e-business world... the biggest risk is faced by those who do nothing at all.