E-business/E-government/E-commerce
The Internet is changing
the way businesses, organizations, and governments communicate with customers,
suppliers, and citizens. Because
this topic is too broad to cover in one hour, your group should find a
sub-topic within B2C, B2B, or e-government.
Option A: B2B
Exchanges
Competitors
within an industry are realizing that each individual corporation spends a
significant amount of resources on direct procurement for critical
commodities. Because critical
commodities do not serve to differentiate competitors, there are strong
incentives for competitors to collaborate to reduce everyone's costs. Vertical B2B offers an ideal platform
for inter-organizational collaboration among competitors to reduce industry
costs.
Horizontal B2B increases buying power across several sectors to
reduce the costs of back office procurement (furniture, laptops, etc.).
Your group should
start by looking at the size of B2B markets (dollars spent), future
projections, the number of exchanges that exist, how exchanges earn money
(subscription, transaction fees), the value propositions to customers and
suppliers.
Your group should
look in-depth at some exchanges.
Examples of
exchanges you might explore:
- The rich history of COVISENT. On February 25, 2000 Daimler/Chrysler, Ford Motor
Company, and General Motors founded Covisint to
serve as the world's largest online business-to-business exchange for the
automotive industry. The original vision for Covisint was for all participants to makes gains by
reducing new vehicle development cycles to a year and a half or less,
reduce order-to-delivery cycles, and reduce costs through
efficiencies from asset sharing. Although Covisint
did not initially generate the projected revenues initially promised,
investors such as Ford declared they did not lose money on their investment. But other automakers refused to do
business on an open exchange because of the fear of competitor espionage.
Despite the real or perceived risks of such ventures, clearly B2B
exchanges are opening up new opportunities for managing critical
commodities. According to Covisint’s
Website, today Covisint users from 90,000
organizations! (See http://www.covisent.com/) The site also had podcasts and
other great information.
- ARIBA’s Freemarkets (see http://www.ariba.com/about/
.In 2004, Freemarkets claimed to have saved customers
$4.2 billion on sales of $21.2 billion. Freemarkets
actually bought COVISENT in 2004, then Ariba bought Freemarkets. Ariba now claims
operate on nearly four million desktops around the world. This site also has live demos.
Prior groups have done some interesting presentations
on the following exchanges:
·
Farms.com is a B2B
for farmers, including livestock
·
Steelscreen.com
is a B2B for metal products
·
WorldWide Retail
Exchange (wwre.com) is a B2B
exchange for supermarkets, including perishable and non-perishable food items
·
Anheuser-Busch’s
Bud-exchange for A-B’s suppliers
Please note that we are talking about
business-to-business exchanges, NOT business-to-consumer exchanges. Thus, do
not select exchanges such as ebay.
Whichever exchanges you choose to study, be
sure to include:
- Size of exchange in terms of total sales made on the exchange,
number of customers, number of suppliers,
- Major products of exchange
- General characteristics of customers and suppliers
- Who founded the exchange? When?
- What is the exchange's business model (how do they generate
revenue, have they earned a profit?)
- What is the promised value to customers?
- What is the promised value to suppliers?
- How do members interact with the system?
- Is the exchange successful or is it too early to tell?
- Are there competing exchanges in this market? If so, how does this
exchange differentiate itself?
It is very important that you
show us the exchange--what do the screens look like, how do auctions occur,
etc.
Much of the research may be through
secondary sources, but it would be highly useful to interview some major
customers or suppliers who do business on the exchange. What are they pleased
with? What do they want changed? Will more or less of their future transactions
be done on the exchange?
For your closing, the best and worst
practices might include three perspectives:
1. Exchange: What are the key
features of successful exchanges?
2. Customers: When and why should a
customer use an exchange? When should they not?
3. Suppliers: When and why should a
supplier use an exchange? When should they not? Does this cannibalize sales in
another channel?
If you have other creative ideas, please
feel free to discuss them with me.
Option B: E-government applications
According to Wikipedia, e-government “refers to
government’s use of information and communication technology (ICT) to
exchange information and services with citizens, businesses, and other arms of
government.” (URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-government
viewed on Dec 19, 2006).
Your group should investigate the dollars spent on e-government, the
promised benefits of e-government, and the potential pitfalls of e-government. Your group should examine 2 to 3
e-government applications in some detail.
These applications could be implemented by federal, state, county, or city
governments. For example, one group
studied how New York City implemented a system to connect criminal databases directly
to police officers’ vehicles.
Other applications might show how some innovative municipalities have
many online transactions (vehicle registration, voter registration, property
taxes, etc.) It is very important that you show us the
application--what do the screens look like, how citizens interact with the
application, etc.
Ideally, your group might interview some
people who have an “insider’s view” of the application, someone
in government that understands how the application affected service and costs.
Option C: B2C:
E-commerce
This is the ONLY option that
does not require the group to do original interviews. Based on my vast experience with group
projects on this topic, the topic works best when the units of analyses are the
world and particular countries.
Begin the presentation with
current statistics on:
- size of B-2-C market worldwide
- size of B-2-C market by country
- Demographics of Internet Buyers
- Global spread of Internet hosts
- Most common languages used in e-commerce
- Revenues generated from Internet sales
- Most popular products sold
- Most popular e-commerce web sites
Some
groups also focus on specific countries, such as
Your
group might want to focus on a few interesting e-commerce sites, including an
in-class demonstration. Or your group might want to focus on certain
interesting sub-sets of e-commerce, such as non-profit, religion, gambling,
fortune telling, etc. The point is to find something that will be news to the
audience...we do NOT need a case study
on amazon or ebay.
Your group might
conclude with a set of best practices for ensuring success. With a million web
sites, how would a company gain a customer base? How do they advertise? How do
they gain customer loyalty? I am sure that your group will have many creative
ideas, so please feel free to discuss them with me.