Executive′s Guide to E–Business: From Tactics to Strategy - Hardcover

Is E-Business Helping You--Or Your Competitors? E-business is transforming the commercial landscape and completely redefining traditional business assumptions. In an e-nabled world: * Customers demand personalized, intimate relationships resulting in new levels of transaction simplicity and service value. Companies use the Internet to expand into new markets and grow. * Products and services are designed for e-sales and customer segmentation. Companies package their most strategic asset--institutional knowledge--and bundle information with products and services to create new value for customers. * Business processes seamlessly integrate with customers and business partners as companies build value networks, focus on their core competencies, and outsource non-core business components. * Organizational structures are aligned to clarify internal governance for e-business. Process-oriented measures maximize the worth of information velocity in the value network. * Systems and technologies utilize the Internet for most interactions between customers and business partners. Rapidly developing and maturing e-business applications make the Internet the place to do business. * People and culture are transformed as work forces embrace the value of partnering and external relationships and employee knowledge equates to service value. In Executive's Guide to E-Business: From Tactics to Strategy, PricewaterhouseCoopers professionals present a new model that all executives and managers involved in an e-business undertaking can use to prepare for the challenges of disruptive change, to foster communication and understanding throughout their organizations, and to achieve sustained competitive advantage. In doing so, they reveal the B2B e-business tactics and strategies used by successful companies worldwide to significantly boost performance and substantially improve market share. With information applicable to a wide range of industries, Executive's Guide to E-Business will help any company take its rightful place in the e-nabled world and reap the tremendous benefits of the e-business revolution.

Today, executives and managers who still view e-business as a passing fad or only as a vision of the future risk being left behind. Clearly, e-business is here now and here to stay. E-business once belonged solely to aggressive start-ups that grabbed market share by positioning themselves between traditional companies and their customers. Increasingly, traditional companies are waking up and fighting back by using e-business to leapfrog the competition and achieve sustained competitive advantage.

While much attention has been given to the business-to-consumer (B2C) aspect of e-business, the business-to-business (B2B) component is what twenty-first-century executives need to understand to win over the long term. Companies that successfully integrate e-business into their strategies are held in higher regard by the financial markets and generate greater shareholder value than those that do not. The growing number of high-profile e-business success stories offers indisputable evidence of the benefits of online business savvy. Today?s and tomorrow?s e-xecutives need to know how they can achieve similar results.

Written by PricewaterhouseCoopers professionals, Executive?s Guide to E-Business: From Tactics to Strategy offers a new model that prepares you to implement the changes necessary to guide your company through the dynamic e-business panorama. Perhaps for the first time, this model provides a holistic view of e-business, placing all of the key issues within a simple, understandable framework. Further, it clarifies the e-business positions a company can occupy and presents a detailed analysis of the benefits, pitfalls, technologies, and implications of each. The authors guide you through four e-business snapshots: channel enhancement, value chain integration, industry transformation, and convergence. Along the way, they provide answers to the many questions, both basic and complex, currently facing executives.

Questions such as:

• What e-business position should I hold, and how fast should I move?
• How do I best use e-nabling technologies for competitive advantage?
• How will e-business affect my company?s organization, people, processes, and technology?
• How do I forge and then structure the strategic partnerships I will need to satisfy customers who expect far more than in the past?

Both accessible and comprehensive, this indispensable book will also show you how to manage risk in the e-business environment and how to prepare your company to take its place among the fully e-nabled extraprises?extended enterprises consisting of companies and their value chain partners?that will define the e-business landscape of the future.

Whether your goal is to explore the fast-moving panorama of the e-business world or to formulate a winning e-business strategy, this book will help you chart a course for e-business success and show you how to leverage this powerful force to achieve competitive excellence.