How to ACT on your e-business strategy

By Basheera Khan, UK correspondent, ITWeb

Johannesburg, 30 Aug 2000

An e-business strategy is an essential to any business, Cambridge Technology Group MD John Berry told delegates at the African Computing and Telecommunications summit (ACT 2000) at Sun City today.

This was nothing new to most of his audience, he admitted, but he reinforced the dire warnings many have heard before.

"There is an oversupply of just about every commodity or service on a global scale that any of your companies sell today," he said. "We in Africa shouldn`t think that we are not involved just because we have a small number of Internet users. Whether you happen to be in Kenya, Ghana, Johannesburg or Paris, we are all facing increasingly sophisticated customers."

E-business must be adopted to lower the price of doing business, to milk more money from existing customers and to manage those customers more efficiently, he said.

Bottomless financial pit

Ram Ramakrishnan, MD of LanBit Technologies in the United Arab Emirates, had dire warnings of his own. E-commerce can be a bottomless financial pit, he noted, and the easy venture capital available, the desire to be the next Bill Gates and the volatility of the market means that millions are lost.

His advice to avoid losing money in the craze is to get technology straight from the tap, test the planned revenue model, use e-business to enhance efficiency and not only to conduct business, and to accept that a the progression from bricks-and-mortar to e-commerce does not happen overnight.

"You can`t jump from A to Z overnight," he admonishes those who are thinking of venturing into the field.

Related discussions revolved around e-procurement, and managing resources on enterprise networks.

Rob Monteith, director of e-Solutions SA, walked delegates through e-procurement, which he says is the crux of most e-business strategies, because it allows companies to make significant cost savings on the numerous transactions made acquiring non-mission-critical materials and resources.

Value contributions

The importance of this e-business component, he said, is illustrated by the number of e-procurement hubs or marketplaces which have sprung up in SA in the last eight months alone. And at the end of the day, e-procurement plays an important role in companies` realisation of savings and shareholder value contributions.

Monteith advised businesses addressing their e-procurement strategies to ensure that whichever application they choose, it`s got to be able to use electronic data interchange. Potential pitfalls, he noted, can be found in the arenas of content management, solution integration, supplier adoption and breadth of market focus.

Stressing the importance of integration, Monteith quipped: "Without integration, you just make mistakes a hell of a lot more quickly." He advised business managers to have a complete vision that starts off with an e-procurement application from which other e-business applications can be launched.

A key factor to the success of an integrated e-business application is one which addresses the customer environment as we know it today, said James Stewart, corporate business strategist for Novell Europe, Middle East and Africa.

That environment, he said, is one in which numerous technology platforms are deployed across individual enterprises, a critical skills shortage abounds across all borders, a business` reach and scope are almost unlimited and security of information is paramount. The challenge is to present users with fast, consistent experiences in e-procurement marketplaces.