My thoughts about E-Business and E-Commerce Management book

Introduction

This is going to be my final post on the E-Business and E-Commerce Management book. This post will be divided into two parts: the first part will cover the third part of this book which is “Implementation”, this part includes change management, analyses & design, and implementation & maintenance.  I will give my personal experiences about this topic as well. The second part will reflect the overall outcome of this unit, and that will include class exercises, my thoughts about debate exercise, student characteristics, and second life case study. I will conclude the post with some recommendations that are based on my experience and knowledge from the survey that I conducted amongst the classmates. 

Implementation

There is no doubt about the importance of making a change in management from time to time, as it’s the key to success for any organization. However, we have to understand that there are different types of changes in businesses that have to be considered; while implementing a flexible plan for e-commerce that could adapt to unexpected changes, human resource requirements and employees abilities & capabilities to deal with new technology, describing alternative approaches to organization structure resulting from organizational change, and understanding the role of the manager amongst employees and how in the staff should be managed in different marketing conditions. It is not easy to implement all these factors without analyzing and designing a system that enables us to identify the key factors that ensure success. The video that we watched in class “Change Management Training” made me think how important it is to involve employees in the change process within the organization, this is because when employees participate in making decision, they feel important and as a result they enhance their efficiency. Moreover, the leader of the team or the manger must estimate each member’s skills and distribute the role according to that, and also take control according to the situation.

Coming to my personal experience with the topic of management, in 2006 I worked in Saudi Arabia for an organization called Saudi Cancer Society. It works to help unfortunate people who are diagnosed with cancer, and are facing financial difficulties. I do remember the low ranking of our organization compared to others, the system in this organization was a topical old system, with interference in the role of the employees. Conflict between the decisions wasted a large amount of resources on useless services and as a result the organization had a weak reputation. However, in the mid of 2007 we had a new management. Ever since the new manager came, the entire plan of the organization has changed. Each employee in the organization is now able to raise his voice, and suggest new ideas and works within an integrated plan. As a result of that change, in the end of year 2008 the organization had three different awards, two of them were local for being the number one organization in this field, and there was an international award as well. Hillary Clinton also visited the organization on her trip to Saudi Arabia. However, none of these accomplishments could be achieved without making a change in the plans and decision making process, and it showed how change management is important for any organization.

Strategy and application

The second part of the book was quite interesting as it’s highlighted the following topics, E-business strategy, supply chain management, E-procurement and E-marketing. To start with, we all know that organizations in all its different types and size have to define a strategy in order to structure the future directions & actions toward specific goals. However, organizations nowadays have a high speed of development as a result of adapting different types of technology. In order to develop a successful e-business strategy we must have a framework that has fore stages as the lecturer indicated, strategic evaluation, strategic objective, strategy definition and strategy implementation, these fore elements have to be structured in a way that fit all different goals for each department within a business to achieve the main objective. Another important aspect in e-business is we have to define organization e-business strategy according to business unit, regional or functional. Also the lecturer highlighted the important of integrated electronic channels with the existing channels which will create more efficiency. Finally, the most important point that we discuss during the class is that, e-business strategy is became a requirement in all types of today businesses, e-business strategy most reflect the main goal for the organization and that by integrating the electronic strategy with the existing strategy.

Intro to E-Businesses & Commerce Management

As the lecturer kick off the firs lecture after introducing E-business unit outline, distinguish between electronic business & electronic commerce components was the first lessons that we took home with us. The idea that I hold in my mind for a quite long time about the relationship between e-marketing and e-commerce were quite shallow, when I found that e-commerce refer to all electronic mediated information exchange between an organization and its external stakeholder, while e-marketing is a site of processes aimed to create communication, delivering and exchanging goods that have value between customers, clients, partner and society. In general understanding the different between e-marketing and e-commerce is important to us as marketers in order to gain benefits from surrounding opportunities in today market, also e-commerce have a direct impact on traditional  businesses and it always good to know how to apply the new technology in existing businesses.  Using electronic devices in the business sector have so many advantages over the organization that adapting this form of technology. However, risks and barriers could occur as a result of using the wrong type of technology or using it on inefficient ways. A practical example of using the right types of technology within an organization is using ipad devices by SAP Company.

The Internet  become the revelation technology on the last decade, it’s became a global communication network that people used as C2C, B2C, B2G and all other types of relationship between consumers, businesses and government to transfer or exchange information and value via World Wide Web (WWW) in a standard format off (HTML), (HTTP) and (TCP/IP).  E-commerce has different types of models that enable the companies to identify its core product and services value proposition, target consumers and online marketplace competitors, in order to generate revenue through online business. Adapting new tools and technology that deal with the internet such as a smart phone could help e-commerce services to gain good benefits for its customers and partners as well as reducing the organization expenses in IT sector. Personally I found chapter two is more about implementing the internet network on traditional business and how to establish an online business as a part of the organization strategy, and for chapter three (e-business infrastructure) is more applying to IT sector, as it’s provide the readers with more details about the technical components. What is important about these two chapters is to identifying the mine business and marketplace models for communication and trading and understand that hardware and software used to build e-business infrastructure within an organization.