Effects of E-business and Evolving Capabilities

It's clear that the Internet has brought about a new level of productivity and competitiveness for individuals and businesses worldwide. But this online revolution has also created significant challenges for organizations. As customers rush to use Web services providing instant and personalized attention, businesses are struggling with managing increased competition, eroding customer bases, and growing financial pressures through outdated business models that are supported by a multitude of unintegrated technologies in their environments.

Enterprise Applications

Global 2000 organizations are defining and implementing a new breed of e-commerce functions that cut across traditional application boundaries. These enterprise applications require corporate-wide strategies for integrating transactions, information, and business processes. The ability to successfully manage the integration of these business processes is a key indicator for success in implementing customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives.

Business Process Integration (BPI)

One challenge large organizations face is reconciling the separate, yet overlapping, initiatives of CRM, extended supply-chain management and sell-side e-commerce, and identifying the shared software components and infrastructure technology required to enable them.

Businesses must define a strategy and technology road map for synchronizing multiple sales and service channels across the enterprise at the business process level (for example, call centers, sales force automation solutions, Web-based self-service, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms, public/private marketplaces). Because CRM spans all customer touch-points, and therefore, has implications for each of these business initiatives, it is a prime driver for BPI.

Internal and External Integration

Internal and external application integration functions are becoming key components within the e-business application software platform. Although integration between components within these platforms is currently limited, enterprise application integration (EAI) and interenterprise integration (IEI) capabilities will soon be bundled with other software platform components (for example, application servers, portal frameworks, personalization services).

Industry experts predict that by 2004/05, vendor-provided software stacks will deliver the common core infrastructure services required to deploy, integrate, and manage distributed applications. This will enable application development organizations to focus on increasing corporate value by creating business services and processes that link those services within their organizations as well as across extended commerce chains.

Corporate CRM systems will require the convergence of internally focused EAI solutions and B2B-focused IEI solutions.

Business Performance Monitoring

As technology advances have made it feasible, companies have begun to drive the information that usually resides in management-reporting databases and data warehouses back to the point of origin. Traditionally, companies collect information about all their transactions, performance of processes and products, marketing customer information, and sales and service occurrences and store it in databases designated for the reporting of trends, issues, and opportunities to management.

Business alerts enable companies to identify key business events, or thresholds, which when they occur, trip an alert that notifies management that something important has taken place. For instance in a professional services firm, when a certain percentage of account billings extend beyond thirty days past due, a special report can be delivered to an account manager to start focusing collections efforts on those accounts, significantly increasing revenues collected.

Sometimes called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), these business alerts notify the appropriate business people when certain thresholds are crossed or certain actions are recognized. KPIs provide a new level of business performance monitoring, keyed to your specific measures and metrics.