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Information and
communication technologies (ICTs) run through
business, affecting (determining, promoting,
conditioning) both the internal functioning of
organizations and their offers and relationships
with customers, suppliers and competitors.
In view of the
countless complexities and uncertainties involved in
the business environment on Internet, the designing
and launching of electronic businesses is an
interesting challenge that must be tackled from many
dimensions and requires a broad range of skills
throughout the value chain.
Via Internet, a
business “opens its doors up to the world” at costs
that are lower than those of a traditional business
and a virtual customer has access to a much wider
and more varied range of products. At the same time,
it is said that, on the web, competition is just
“click away.”
To understand
the complex and multidimensional nature of
electronic business, the phenomenon must be viewed
as a structure involving the intervention of social,
technological, cultural and historical elements. The
complexity has to do with how the elements
comprising this structure relate to each other, the
internal dynamics of a system, and the development
of new patterns of behavior based on the
interrelation of the parts.
Market research provides
evidence that current levels of Internet use to do
business with consumers and other companies are
highly significant. Nua and CyberAtlas, among
others, regularly compile estimates of e-commerce
activities in different sectors and geographical
markets.
By case, the share of
e-commerce in total retail sales in the United
States (without including food) rose from 0.6% in
1999 to 2.8% in 2006. Mary Meeker, media analyst for
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (www.morganstanley.com),
made a remark about the increase in Internet use
that was highly illustrative. She took a
retrospective look at how long the principal media
took to be adopted by 50 million users in the United
States. Whereas it took decades for telephone,
radio and TV to reach this figure, for Internet it
was only a matter of five years. In other words,
the growth rate of Internet exceeds by far the rate
of adoption observed in any other popular
technology, whether television, radio, cell phones
or pagers, in the second half of the twentieth
century.
The business-to-consumer (B2C) report published by
VISA in 2008, based on a study conducted by
AméricaEconomía Intelligence (AEI), stresses the
121% growth rate of e-commerce in Latin America over
the past two years, with a volume of transactions
amounting to US$10.908 billion in 2007. The table
attached herewith, published in this study,
highlights the growth of B2C by country.
Consequences of
Online Business
No clear boundaries to
the industry
One evident major impact of e-commerce has been its
capacity to blur the boundaries or borders of
traditional industry. The economy has been
restructured around the consumer, attentive to the
needs of demand rather focusing on the supply side.
Thus, former industrial classification systems used
by governments, such as the Standardized Industrial
Classification (SIC), is losing ground to other
alternatives. Even in households, it is difficult
to mark the boundaries between alternative
telecommunications networks (for example,
traditional telephone lines and Internet
communication) and TV (cable, digital, satellite and
other wireless providers). It can be said that this
problem of “marking boundaries” is actually
occurring at various levels, with two major ones:
the “contents” or products for consumers, and the
platforms or technologies that distribute these
products on the marketplace.
As the newsletter of the Telephone Communication
Society had already indicated in 2006: “An
unstoppable process taking place in the ICT sector
for a long time now is the technological convergence
between the worlds of information technologies,
telecommunications and the audiovisual sector. This
phenomenon has been favored by the digitalization of
all kinds of signals, whether voice, text, image or
video. As a result, the progressive integration of
uses and functions among different networks and
access facilities, user equipment and terminals, as
well as in the services and applications offered on
them, is increasingly apparent.”
(sociedaddelainformacion.telefonica.es)
This course is aimed at identifying and reviewing
critical factors for understanding and effectively
designing electronic business.
Magister Carola Jones
Instructor of this course |
