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:
- 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
has not generated the projected revenues initially promised, investors
such as Ford have declared they did not lose money on their investment . But other automakers have 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 supports over 266,000
users from 30,000 organizations in nearly 100 countries in the global
automotive industry. (See http://www.covisent.com/)
- ARIBA’s Freemarkets (see http://www.freemarkets.com/).
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 to
manage over $170 Billion in annual procurement spend managed and processes
one purchase order every two seconds.
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
Ideally, although not a requirement, your
group might interview some people who have an “insider’s
view” of the application.
Option C: B2C:
E-commerce
Begin the presentation with
current statistics on:
- size of B-2-C market
- Demographics of Internet Surfers
- Global spread of Internet hosts
- Revenues generated from Internet sales
- Most popular products sold
- Most popular web sites
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, 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.