E-Business

The shift from explicit to tacit knowledge is called

1. Socialisation
2. Internalisation
3. Externalisation
4. Combination

Story telling:

The main focus of storytelling is on values and emotions

Story telling is often centred on the underlying question of why.

1. Employees with more autonomy are more likely to share their knowledge
2. Financial rewards are effective in persuading people to share knowledge
3. Recognition is a good incentive for people to share their knowledge
4. Recognition needs to be personal and cannot be achieved via technological means

• Forms/typologies of knowledge (explicit/implicit/tacit)
• Knwoledge vs. Information & data
• Cognition, cognitive load (instrinsic, extraneous), offloading
• Knowledge society/ knwoledge worker/ motivation, production factor

• Definition of KM
• KM (productivity) challenges; role of a knowledge manager; reasons for/agains knowledge sharing
• Concepts: building lbocks disciplines & schools of KM; knowledge spiral
• Instruments: community of practice, story telling, after action review, peer assist, champions, knowledge maps and knowledge networks.

• Role of IT
• Typology: social interaction /HCI, push/pull/hybrid..
• E.g. of digital tools/platforms, e.g. challenge of locating expertise
• The role of AI in KM
• Development: design research, scenarios, bottom up KM system
• Recognition system.

• The increasing spread of IT influences and changes value creation processes
  • In almost every industry and
  • In almost every specialist field
• Changes in industry structures affect people and organisations in many ways (e.g. chances and risks emerge)
• The performance of specialist fields is dependent from - among other factors - an intelligent exploitation of the potential of IT.
• This is an evolutionary process that has been going on for decades

The significance of e-business for the value creation in companies is increasing. “Business concepts can become more intelligent because humans and organisations use IT as an intelligence amplifier.”

• Until approximately 1993
  • Applications limited to a single specialist field inside the organisation
  • Focus: to increase efficiency - with remarkable effects on processes and jobs
  • Closed systems, mainly internally integrated
• Starting approximately in 1993 (www browser)
  • Explosive spread of the Internet because of open standards and the usability of the WWW
  • Rise of the “new economy” and new business models: e-business
• Starting approximately in 2007 (iPhone)
  • Breakthrough of mobile computing
  • Improvements in data management and analytics
  • New paradigms: cloud computing, blockchain
  • Information technology becomes part of almost everything: smart devices, Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Networked IT becomes part of other fields of innovation: robotics, biotechnology, 3D-printing, self-driving car, etc.

In 2010 and beyond, digitalisation is a popular collective term for the application of technologies and concepts which can be seen as decisive for the economic and social development. The information systems are omnipresent because they are based on mobile and cloud technologies and because people, organisations and things are represented digitally. Some of the systems can act independently.

• Digitalisation increases the opportunities for action in different ways, e.g.
  •  in the personal interaction (social media),
  • in the design of business models (e-business),
  • in the understanding of property (sharing economy),
  • in the creation of trust (blockchain) and
  • in the further development of other areas like robotics or biotechnology

• The value creation processes in work-sharing organisations are becoming more and more penetrated by IT in all specialist fields.
• The impact of the use of IT on society and economy is increasing and more and more showing a disruptive character.
• IT as an instrument for value creation has to be aligned with business processes and business models.
• IT can take the effect of an intelligence amplifier.

• Digital Transformation denotes the change of different areas of life through the increasing digitalisation, sometimes in combination with other technologies. The speed and parallelism of various developments create a dynamism and complexity that make forecasts and planning more difficult.
• Related to the economy as a whole, this means the change of economic structures.
• Related to an individual organisation it means the change of the own business model.

• Application of innovative technologies:
  • Mobile devices and extension by apps,
  • Higher bandwidths and availability of the Internet at lower transmission costs,
  • Cloud computing,
  • Internet of Things,
  • Artificial intelligence,
  • Big Data
  • VR+AR,
  • Voice control and speech recognition,
  • Robotics (service and security),
  • Chat bots, video chat,
  • Facial recognition,
  • 3D printing,
  • Block chain technology
• Shorter innovation and change cycles, parallel developments
  • higher dynamics and complexity
  • forecasting and planning become more difficult
• Disruptive developments
  • New business models force companies, industries and value-added service (VAS) to change
• Changes are not limited to the economy, but extend to society as a whole.
• Stronger individualization
• Greater involvement of the customer in development and production processes
• Changed communication behaviour (text instead of language)

E-business is the support of business relationships and processes of a company with ist business partners, customers and employees using networked information technology. It is conductin business activities like distribution, buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services across company boundaries electronically.

E-organisation is the support of relationships and processes inside a company using networked information technology.

Main characteristics of E-Organisation

• Applications in the area of e-organisation extend the internal and function-specific information systems and IT tools with functionalities, which enable cross-functional communication and collaboration.
• The older function-specific systems are specialised to be used in the specialist department and do not optimally support organisational aspects.

Initial position in the Music Store Group:

• Acquisitions led to a heterogeneous group structure.
• Brands were taken over and maintained. n Employees identified themselves strongly with the individual branch.
• Still, strategic and operative guidelines have to be realised uniformly.

New processes were realised across branches (cross-location): previously isolated branches were connected to each other

• for important business processes and
• with regard to the internal know-how.

Results:

• Improved service and value creation to the customer (know-how and logistics)
• Increased identification of the employees with the whole company (and not only with the own branch or department)

E-Organisation at Music Store

Results of the project:

• Customer oriented, very broad and in-depth product line with regional specialities (branch-specific core areas)
• Increased consulting competence because of the music supplies database
• Online shop as an additional sales channel, enabling sales abroad
• Regional and branch-specific specialities (e.g. piccolo flutes in Basel) can be sold in all branches because of the cross-location virtual warehouse
• Higher customer loyalty because of increased availability of the music supplies
• Faster shipping of orders because of efficient processes
• Improved stock turnover in the branches

• E-Commerce is e-business in the relationship with customers
• E-commerce is the support of business relationships and processes of a company with its customers using networked information technology.
• E-commerce can comprise one or more transaction phases
  • Mostly, the term e-commerce refers to transaction processes in which at least the agreement phase takes place online. Companies usually use this understanding of the term for defining their e-commerce sales.
  • On the other hand, this understanding excludes many variations of ecommerce, specifically in the are of cross-channel services. This is the reason to use a broader understanding of e-commerce.
• E-Commerce and CRM systems extend the internally oriented sales support system with functionalities
  • which customers can use by themselves or
  • which gather the customer profile automatically and allow better targeted activities.

• E-procurement is e-business in the relationship with other companies
• E-procurement is the support of business relationships and processes of a company with its suppliers using networked information technology
• E-Procurement and SCM systems extend the internally oriented procurement support system with functionalities that optimise the procurement and the collaboration with suppliers.

Assessment of the term e-business

• The term e-business emerged in the early 1990s when the Internet technology spread explosively.
  • It is the birth of the awareness that networked IT will have a strong influence on economy and society.
  • In 1997, IBM propagated the artificial term e-business globally in extensive advertising campaigns.
• The term e-business is still not uniform, definitions are different in details.
• E-business is interconnected with traditional value creation activities, an isolated analysis or treatment is not possible.
• An e-business concept is more or less independent from the used technology and extends the Internet technology.

Again and again, the evolution of networked IT and its applications creates new buzzwords, e.g. Digital Transformation or Industry 4.0.

The unique success of the internet lead to E-business

• The usability of the service World Wide Web (WWW), starting in 1992, lead to the breakthrough of the much older Internet technology.
  • Graphical user interfaces (MS Windows became popular in 1990)
  • Hypermedia (intuitive link navigation instead of hierarchical directories)
  •  Speaking Internet addresses based on the Domain Name System DNS
• The following serves as a basis for the explosive and worldwide spread of the Internet:
  • Open standards: general availability of the technical methods and processes (instead of proprietary and patented technologies)
  • Free usage of the Internet services and – as a result of the intensive competition – many free offerings on the Internet.
• The success of the Internet lead to numerous new IT applications in the economy and to the term e-business.

E-Business has impact patterns,

• Brokerage effect
• Information effect
• Delegation effect
• Integration effect

E-business solutions are complex. But they can be reduced to four fundamental impact or effect patterns:

• E-business solutions can provide an on-demand access to information which helps the user to achieve his or her goals (capability to act)
• E-business solutions can intermediate between two or more involved parties by supporting search (e.g. for the market price) or configuration with interactive, automated dialog processes.
• E-business solutions can integrate business models and processes of the involved parties by integrating their IT systems. Several involved parties build a value creation system.
• E-business solutions can make complex decisions based on rules and triggered automatically by data received from sensors or other data sources.

The impact patterns are an abstract clue (way of thinking). They cannot be strictly separated and in practice, they mostly occur combined with each other

• Exploitation of information as some kind of a resource (information can be seen as data or knowledge that is use in a decision or action context of a person. )
• Create the capability to decide and act: everywhere, always (7*24), relevant
• Shift of paradigm:
  • On demand -> the trigger to look for information turns to the customer (from push to pull mechanisms).
  • Interaction instead of messages or missions
  • Partners would like to decide by themselves which channel they use to cover their information need

• Worldwide reference database for music supplies with 430‘000 titles (1/4 of the globally available supply)
• Experts in the branches maintain the database and consult competently.
• The database in four languages enabled the start of export trade via e-commerce.
• Customers look for new titles and can order them immediately.
• Competitors order at the group owned wholesale.
• From the search behaviour, trends can be derived. à Musik Hug is able to act according to trends and regional needs.

• Value creation with information (Rayport/Sviokla 1996)
  • Collect
  • Systematise (build a taxonomy)
  • Select
  • Merge
  • Distribute
• An adequate (related to needs) utilisation of information requires useful structures (taxonomy) in data management (data modelling) and a consequent and homogeneous data maintenance.
• The entities managed by the database have to be classified according to the taxonomy. As a classification can be fuzzy (risk level of an investment, genre of music supplies), the know how of a company can be seen in the suitability of the chosen classification for practice.

• Electronic media connect supply and demand, allow manual or automated selection and decision making
  • for information as well as
  • for products and services.
• Dialog processing and communication enable, e.g. the interactive configuration of products.
• Electronic exchanges and auctions automate negotiations.
• Market performance has been newly defined and can be
  • aggressive (focusing on the product price) or
  • defensive (creating hardly comparable products and services).

E.g.

• oelpooler " buy fuel oil jointly at lower prices"
  • Virtual community for buying fuel oil (households and companies)
  • Weekly pooling of orders per region
  • lower prices and transport costs
  • Price alert
  • The platform itself becomes contractor
  • Oelpooler charges the supplier a commission/brokerage fee
  • Winner of „Best of Swiss Web“ 2001 in the category „business model“
• Brokerage effect at airbnb
  • Selection based on various criteria
• uber

• Companies overcome their system boundaries (on the levels of the business model, business processes and IT).
• A central system has automatic access to independent other systems and uses their functions and data (indirect system use).
• Flexible value creation communities or virtual companies emerge.
• Supply chain management requires the integration of the participating companies
• Virtual company or flexible value creation community. The customer needs will be satisfied in a new way, with more flexibility, more individualisation

E.g.

• Combine travel offerings (expo Milano + short stay in the Tessin)

• Music Store: the virtual warehouse
  • Several decentralised warehouses can be managed like one
  • Movements between the warehouses take place automatically
  • Processes o outgoing goods (e.g. for shipment to a customer) take the different locations into account
• Rotronic Secomp: the thirds party deals
  • An upstream value creation step (e.g. wholesaler or importer) ships goods in the name of a retailer directly to the retailter's customer
  • The end customer does not see exactly where the goods come from
  • The concept of third party deals (transfer orders) can lead to more than one delivery with the customer

• Information systems are no longer just tools for our personal tasks (e.g. office tools, business software) or invisibly supporting systems (embedded systems, e.g. in a washing machine).
• Computers are increasingly making active and independent decisions, without any individual being involved.
  • The activity is triggered by events received via sensors or other types of signals, e.g. user behavior in the IT network.
  • The activity can be based on complex sets of rules that determine the actions in detail.
  • The activity can be based on data that is available somewhere in the network and on ad hoc analyses of large databases.
  • The activity can trigger actions that were previously reserved for humans.
• -> Delegation to the system

E.g.

• Recruiting robots support HRM
• Internet of thins (IoT) information systems can be part of things: smart devices, Iot, some systems can "learn" by expanding their data and rules independently "artificial intelligence"

E-business is the support of business relationships and processes of a company with ist business partners, customers and employees using networked information technology.

• Information effect
  • Extend paper lexicon, technical papers, customer service information
  • Knowledge database
  • My shop: transaction history of the customer
  • Communicate service offers
  • Customer support
  • Availability information
  • Product and brand overview
  • Order confirmation
  • Change management
  • Add creative solutions to website
• Brokerage effect
  • Broker platform for logistics and transport
  • Asking for offers
  • Transfer profits with customers
  • Freights for return trips
• Integration effect
  • Integration with calculation systems of the suppliers
  • Supplier portal
  • Stock inventory of paper producers
  • Jointly used virtual warehouse
  • Third party deals
  • Integration of product ranges of partners
  • C-Pool

• What are critical success factors
  • Can partners and employees be motivated?
  • Will the target group accept the offer? Will a critical mass be reached withing the usual period?
  • Is the necessary know-how available?
  • Is the legal situation clear? Do conflicts have to be expected?
• What are the earnings
  • Revenue from sales
  • Saved costs compared to the current state
  • Earnings and commission payments, e.g. from brokerage or advertisements
  • Sponsoring by reallocation of internal budgets, e.g. marketing
• What is the E-business vision
• Who is target group (same question for each target group)?
  • Which benefit will be created?
  • Which procedure will create this benefit in an optimal way?
  • With which partners can this procedure be realised best?