LEARNING FOR "WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN INTELLIGENT E-BUSINESS"

In this piece of learning, we'll look at the influence of the Internet on the development of e-Businesses and investigate the notions of cleverness as they exist in an e-Business. We'll do this by:

How e-Businesses renew themselves as Intelligent Organisations

Renewal in a business is not a new idea. Businesses often describe themselves as "renewing" when they change what they do or how they do it. Renewal in this instance should have a profound and dramatic change on how their business operates - for example, it can be a change from operating at a local level to operating at a global level. It can be a change in the way business is done, such as moving away from dealing with customers in outlets on the high street to dealing with them on the phone. Both of these represent a renewal of the business and not just a gradual change, but a strategic decision to do different things, and/or to do things differently.

An e-Business will deal with the notion of renewal in the same way. In many cases, for traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses, the e-Business effort is a representation of the renewal taking place in the organisation.

The Knowledge Economy

Even though organisations have needed information and thrived on it since the end of the second world war, the actual change from businesses adopting new technology to them actually adapting to new technology to gain some kind of advantage really did not start to happen until the late 1980s- this coincides with the increased usage of desktop PCs and local area networks. Businesses started to become knowledge businesses when "ownership" of the ICT infrastructure moved from the finance function (under the auspices of the Finance Director) through the IT department to its own Knowledge and Information function.

The Knowledge Economy is driven by businesses that use knowledge and information to compete, where knowledge and information form part or all of the products and services offered by the business - within this we are aware of concepts such as knowledge workers and informate businesses.

The Learning Organisation

There is plenty of literature that discusses the notion of The Learning Organisation. One aspect is one where employees are in a constant state of personal development in pursuit of organisational objectives. The second aspect is that of an organisation that constantly improves the quantity and quality of information and knowledge at its disposal. This second aspect is sometimes described as Organisational Intelligence (OIQ).

The Intelligent e-Business

A bit more about OIQ - to take the definition further, OIQ can often be regarded as an eBusiness's ability to constantly improve the quantity and quality of information and knowledge (known as organisational update), but the purpose of this is to be able to cope with a turbulent business environment. This allows an e-Business to be able to deal with the needs of its staff, partners, customers, suppliers and so on.

There's an additional feature to OI which expresses the ability of the e-Business to connect to information and knowledge sources, structure it and share it with all those it chooses to. This is known as the Intelligence Quotient of the e-Business.

Management of Information in the Knowledge Economy

There are a series of components and tools that provide the required approach for e-Businesses to manage knowledge.

The fashionable tools used in managing information in the Knowledge Economy include such concepts as data warehousing and data mining.

There is a need for the e-Business to develop and maintain links with its business partners, and this can be done through concepts such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM tools allow the interrogation of trenches of customer information wherever it comes from, perform some kind of analysis and make some kind of decision. CRM is covered in more detail in the part of the module on CRM.

Knowledge Sharing in the Knowledge Economy

A number of commentators identify the period of time when an organisation is renewing itself as a "state of dynamic disequilibrium". This state occurs when businesses are still in the process of dismantling the old features of the business whilst constructing the new components and order of the new business. This is a state which many traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses that investigate an e-Business opportunity face.

One way of coping with this state is through the use of OIQ, although it must be remembered that increasing OIQ may well be part of the state of dynamic disequibrium. OIQ requires that the business shares its information and knowledge well.

Alterations to the way businesses operate and increased knowledge sharing can allow for innovative ways of organising the business. There can be the increased use of dynamic teams - teams which come together purely for a specific purpose (sometimes known as a community of commitment) and disband later on when the project is complete.

Knowledge sharing businesses need to make advanced use of Internet technologies as the enabling mechanism for knowledge sharing, both in the acquisition and provision of knowledge. In particular, the use of strategic tools such as environmental scanning becomes increasingly important as the business environment gradually becomes more complex.

Within the e-Business as a Learning Organisation, the business needs to be aware of the differing types of knowledge that they have to deal with (creation, nurturing and management of). The first knowledge is tacit - held in people's heads in the form of learning, knowledge, know-how, common sense and experience. The second form is the explicit - held in the form of plans, policies, procedures, and other documentation. The final (and difficult to identify) form is background - component parts of the vision and mindset of the people who make decisions in the e-Business.

Knowledge Management in the Intelligent e-Business

You need to be aware of the four stages in the creation of market-facing e-Business, as shown in this table - the Enterprise Solutions Framework.

In a successful market facing e-Business, there will be extensive use of data management tools, Internet and groupware technologies, client-server (particularly remote client) applications and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as those provided by SAP and SAS.