To describe the increasingly interrelated nature of e-business, enterprise tech leaders have latched onto a word more commonly associated with biology: ecosystem.
The use of the word is right on the mark. In a matter of a few years, the Internet has transformed business by changing the way information and data is used and how businesses communicate, in-house and with each other.
The result: companies -whether they're auto manufacturers, retailers, banks, or chip-makers-- are inextricably linked to partners, suppliers and customers in ways unforeseen a few years ago - like one big ecosystem.
The word surfaced repeatedly at an invitation-only conference run by the Center for eBusiness@MIT, last week in Cambridge, Mass., where more than 200 CIOs, IT execs and academic researchers shared strategies for leveraging technology to streamline business operations, share data, and interact more effectively with partners and customers.
"Every company has a diagram of the universe in which they're the center. That's never true. We're all a node in a mesh," said Douglas Busch, CIO of Intel Corp. "Intel's customers are customers of each other, our suppliers are customers of each other...We all circle back to buy things from each other. It's an extraordinarily interdependent ecosystem we're a part of."
The conference let tech execs from MasterCard, Merrill Lynch, JC Penney, Motorola, Intel and elsewhere, hear about e-business approaches that work.
They also heard that, for the monumental strides e-business has made in the last few years, greater advances enabling more effective use of data across organizations are on the horizon.
The Next-Gen World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee described the advances coming with the next-generation Web. Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1990 and now heads the World Wide Web Consortium, which is setting standards for the next-generation Web to further enable networked e-business.
He described a more functional, "semantic Web" in which data is encoded to be used and shared across companies and business processes more easily and intelligently. (Read related story: "Berners-Lee to CIOs: Prepare Now for Next-Gen Web")
E-Business: Who's Doing it Right?
Arun Oberoi, vice president and general manager of Hewlett Packard's worldwide industry and corporate accounts business, told the enterprise execs his company has had to work hard to foster the e-business ecosystem both within the company and with outside suppliers, partners and customers.
No longer, he said, can a company like HP --which is merging with Compaq Computer Corp.- focus on one-off sales of products. Rather, the need for HP to think of itself as part of a interconnected system of organizations -customers, partners, even competitors- is driving the company to change the way it approaches its market, he said.
HP used to operate more like 150 "fiefdoms" than like one big corporation. "We never came to market as one company," he says. But a few years ago the company developed in incubator unit and started thinking about the next wave of the Internet and e-business - and turned the company into a workhorse at trying to provide e-business solutions to enterprise users.
In-house, HP designed and built an employee portal, which connects all employees to things like expense reporting, benefits forms, and other tools. The company developed 170 services in eight languages for its global employee base. The company saved $15 million in costs, reduced the number of servers it needed, consolidated facilities, and streamlined employee-company interactions.
Among internal savings in time and money, the experience bought HP credibility outside its walls, with customers and potential customers who saw that HP knew how to talk e-business.
Productivity Enabler: Wireless
A highlight of the three-day event was the announcement of the MIT Sloan School of Management's eBusiness Awards, which recognize enterprise innovation and technology put to use.
Dominating the awards were wireless firms with global reach "each helping enterprises be more productive by leveraging wireless communications technology - including Vodaphone, NTT DoCoMo, and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry wireless email device. (Read related story: "Wireless Wins Big at MIT
eBusiness Awards")
David Aponovich is senior editor of CIN.
For more information on the Center for eBusiness@MIT, go to ebusiness.mit.edu. For more information on the
MIT Sloan eBusiness Awards, go to www.mitawards.org.
Reprinted from CIN.
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