Overview

The e-business challenge facing companies is complex and can't be easily described from any single perspective. It involves major changes in the way companies do business, including changes in marketing, sales, manufacturing, inventory, and service and product delivery. It involves creating new organizations, redesigning business processes, and moving to a different mix of employees with different skills. In many cases, it involves different products. It certainly requires different computing architectures, infrastructures, new development tools, and a whole new approach to developing software applications.

In Chapter 2 we provided a brief overview of the kind of conceptual changes that company strategists would need to make in order to formulate new goals and policies for their companies. In this chapter we will describe some of the specific changes in business process that companies will need to consider in order to respond to the Internet challenge (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1: An overview of an e-business transition plan.