e-Business on Demand Reenergizes Business Growth and Opportunity
Portals Leverage IT Investments to
Drive Growth and Performance
Robert A. Monio
Director of Strategic Alliances
SBI and Company
A Review of Recent History
Today’s economic picture paints a picture of doom and gloom for organizations trying to figure out how to grow their businesses. Lack of capital spending by customers, increased emphasis on cost cutting to improve profitability, and an overly-zealous prominence on resource productivity have most organizations reeling and unsure where to turn. If you find yours in this predicament, then you’re not alone. But take heart and heed, we’ve been there before and there is an answer.
Back in the mid-90’s organizations were faced with a similar picture. Coming out of the recession at the beginning of the decade, most organizations were faced with the problems of how to grow their businesses without spending too much capital for too little return. The glut of information technology was identified as the leading cause for this malaise. Industry thinkers addressed this problem by focusing on business process reengineering as a way to help companies get value from their IT investments. Leading companies like IBM (through their Lotus acquisition) started to deliver integrated workflow technology which would help companies integrate their disparate backend systems and drive value through information architectures. The advent of this technology – deemed groupware by many industry pundits – was just what we needed to help move companies out of the recessionary spending freeze they were facing.
However, it didn’t just stop there. With most every change in corporate spending habits, there must be other drivers that help accelerate the process. For the latter part of the 90’s, it was two things – the introduction of Web technology and the systemic replacements required by Y2K. These two accelerators caused massive amounts of capital to be released into the market, with major organizations spending billions of dollars implementing replacement enterprise process or function-specific web application systems. These investments promised huge revenue return and business growth – however, as we all know, this didn’t prove to be the case. The resulting “Dot.Com” implosion again left organizations with processes and systems that were not integrated, and disillusioned users could not access the information contained in them. The result: another IT spending recession which has these same companies reevaluating their IT investments and postponing any new purchases until they can address integration issues and realize ROI on their earlier investments.
What’s an Organization to Do?
Once again, companies face an information technology glut and an even larger emphasis on reduced spending until ROI can be realized from their prior investments. Organizations are again struggling to find ways to return value to what IT solutions bring to their companies. Fortunately, this challenge remains less daunting if you consider past history – the notion that process reengineering, combined with the right tools, is the proper elixir required to help companies get value from their investments. During the mid-90’s we called this Business Process Reengineering, today we call it e-Business On Demand.
What is e-Business On Demand?
IBM Corporation has defined e-business on demand (EBOD) in the following manner: an enterprise whose business processes – integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers, and customers - can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or external threat. EBOD systems leverage user interface tools that engage integrated backend systems that optimize the delivery of information and activity to customers, suppliers, distributors, and employees throughout the organization.
EBOD requires three major components: User Interface tools that provide robust interactive capability for applications and collaboration, Integrated connectors and collaboration tools for application integration, and industry-standard tools for application development. In order for organizations to realize the value they are seeking, successful EBOD solutions also require solution providers able to accurately leverage business knowledge with these technical tools.
Together, SBI and Datatrend have the knowledge and expertise to fulfill these requirements. Through the combination of SBI’s extensive subject matter expertise, Datatrend’s superior delivery of IBM eServer and storage solutions (for UNIX, Intel, and other environments), and the technology enhancements available through EBOD solutions, we meet a customer's need to grow while reducing costs, increasing profits, and enhancing their competitive advantage.
Portal Solutions Deliver the Foundation for EBOD Results
Portal environments provide a single access point for business critical information, daily information, collaboration, and workflow with employees, suppliers, and customers. Today's EBOD Portals fall into three distinct categories:
- Business to Employee (B2E) - which include employee-focused workflow activities such as Human Resources, Project Management, R&D, etc.These portals also service the organization's decision-making process and management of intellectual capital.
- Business to Extended Enterprise (B2EE) - addressing the needs of the extended enterprise including suppliers, distributors, and other contributors to the organization’s business efforts (commerce, marketing, customer service and support, etc.).
- Public / Business Community (PBC) - these include general public portals (such as Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and vertical business portals that service focused business communities to increase purchasing and delivery capability.
By providing a single interface for an organization's communication, collaboration, and coordination, Portals deliver a personalized access point to the user, based on the business process involved, their role, and security required.
Key Areas Addressed Through EBOD Portal Solutions
Delivering on the Promise of Interoperability
Personalized access to corporate information has been the goal of corporate IT for twenty years. The stovepipe nature of information systems, the lack of standards and interoperability, and the prohibitive updating of legacy systems have until recently made this goal unattainable.
Recent industry advancements have resulted in tools and technologies that support an integrated application strategy and provide a seamless integration to enterprise data - requirements that must be met in order to deliver true interoperability.
Determining the Value of EBOD Portal Solutions
If any of the following scenarios apply to you and your organization, EBOD Portal Solutions may be of value to you:
- Valuable company information exists in different formats, residing in scattered repositories and locations that employees either do not know exist or cannot access.
- Lack of employee productivity and collaboration - therefore limiting the ability for your organization to deliver more from its personnel resources.
- No visibility mechanism exists to provide business information on your organization's performance - thereby limiting the ability to make timely decisions on business direction.
- Key Customers, Suppliers, and other Business Partners cannot seamlessly participate as part of your organization's business process workflow.
- Concerns over various vendor infrastructure investments and how they work together to meet your long term business plans.
- A lack of understanding as to how business process reengineering, workflow, and application integration may be used to increase the overall performance of your organization.
There are many more scenarios; however, if any of these sound familiar, then now is the time to start putting EBOD Portal Solutions to work for you and your organization.
Making EBOD Portal Solutions Work For You
Portal Solutions help unleash the power of your systems investments and increase your competitive advantage. By leveraging experience in vertical markets and professional re-engineering of customer processes, partners like SBI and Datatrend can help organizations address a variety of issues that affect their business. Through EBOD Portal solutions, we deliver cost savings, increased profit, and improved competitive advantage, meanwhile leveraging the systems assets you've already invested in.
In order to best understand the impact EBOD Portal solutions can have on your organization, we recommend conducting an EBOD Portal Viability Assessment that:
- Confirms the value of collaboration to your company through an understanding of how your enterprise information architecture and business processes map to your organizational goals and direction.
- Establishes a framework of application and data integration - demonstrating what steps would be required to truly integrate your information assets.
- Assesses your information architecture to understand vendor application capability within your environment.
- Demonstrates a change management pathway - one that provides the roadmap to psychological success as it pertains to your people, application adoption, and institutionalization.
Getting the Value You Deserve
Corporations today face increasing pressures to grow their businesses without incurring additional IT infrastructure costs. By leveraging industry-standard technologies combined with focused business knowledge and expertise, companies can realize true value from their IT investments. Competitive advantage improvements, business revenue growth, and process enhancements are but a small subset of the results your organization will garner from taking advantage of EBOD Portal Solutions. The “hangover” caused by the glut of information technology will remain until organizations find ways to unlock the value inherent in their IT investments; therefore, it may be time for SBI, Datatrend, and IBM to help you get the value your organization so richly deserves.
Datatrend's TrendSetter eNewsletter
April 15, 2003
