The e-business journey

Most organisations go through
stages to being fully-fledged e-business.
In its recent e-Day forums around the country, Cisco Systems partnered with esolutions, Xtra and ASB Bank, to show New Zealand business how to use the Internet as competitive advantage
Stage 1. EMAIL. Hooking up to email straight away saves time and money as you exchange letters, memos, and even large data files anytime, anywhere in the world.
Stage 2.WEBSITE. The gateway to new way of working on global scale for even the smallest of firms. Initially it’s little more than brochure or advertisement. But good basic design, with an email link as well as phone number is enough to increase your chances of winning new business over the web.
Stage 3.E-COMMERCE. When customers start to place orders through your website instead of by email, the role of your site has moved from promotion to transaction. This is e-commerce and you can be trading 24-hours day, 365-days year.
Stage 4.E-BUSINESS. If you have branch offices, sales people or engineers operating from home, using the Internet can reduce costs by creating an intranet. An extranet can bring suppliers and other key partners into secure areas of the network to streamline communication across the business and beyond. Key customers can be linked in so that your network becomes an extension of theirs.
Stage 5.BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM. The whole business process is automated via the Internet. By bringing suppliers, customers the corporate infrastructure and alliance partners into the network, the entire supply chain becomes single seamless process, set in action by the placing of an order by the end customer.
Now, when customer places an order, the technology distributes all the relevant information along the length of the supply chain.
(see Business E-fficiency solutions from Cisco.)