Course Overview
It's a rare educational experience where the subject is as young, turbulent,
and constantly "morphing" as the whole area of eBusiness.
The impact of digital/networked technologies, and the experiments they are spawning across business and marketplaces, is still in its infancy and still very rapidly evolving. Beyond that, the unfolding of this practice - much of which will happen during our seven weeks together - has been clouded by a great deal of "noise" on its front end. Over the past few years we've seen the rise and fall of the dot.coms, the emergence of huge valuations based on ephemeral business propositions, tons of media hype, and the slow emergence of real insight. As one of our friends Dr. Mohan Sawhney of Northwestern has said: "It's a rare subject where you can be both a futurist and a historian in the same speech!"
In many ways the impact of the Internet mirrors the impact of other communications technology breakthroughs:
- Television was going to replace radio as a communications medium. It didn't.
- Colleges and Universities would go away as new electronic technologies eliminated the need for classrooms. They aren't.
- Retailers - and a wide variety of intermediaries - were going to be completely and quickly replaced by the Internet as everyone jumped to shop on-line. They are not.
The real impact of digital/networked technologies - and real understanding of eBusiness - is beginning to emerge - slowly - from the morass of chaotic experiments underway.
What's emerging are new and "converging" business models, where eBusiness Strategy is built into the fabric of business planning for leading firms -and an integral part of their work. For this reason, we'll be renaming the course:
"Building Profitable eBusiness Strategy"
Hybrid business designs, combining tangible "brick and mortar" business models with "Dot.com" thinking, tools and techniques, are being formulated. Some of this is business as usual - enhanced by new and powerful tools which enable greater communication, the dissolution of boundaries, and the greater market efficiency. Beyond enhanced operations, however, some of what digital/networked technologies makes possible can be genuinely transformational. Those transformations are beginning to really be seen just now.
Leading-edge businesses are systemically investigating the key challenges, opportunities, and problems they face - and understanding that digital/networked technologies can often provide new and profitable options for dealing with them, creating new value, and building truly unique propositions.
This course will cover concepts, tools and strategies for understanding and exploiting opportunities associated with eBusiness.
We will work together to understand frameworks and tools to help a firm explore and understand many facets and applications of eBusiness, across a wide range of industries. We will discuss frameworks for thinking which enable understanding of an analysis of how existing, incumbent, "brick and mortar" firms (often called BAM's) might approach building an eBusiness strategy, as well as approaches to the beginning of totally new startup businesses ("dot.com's").
Course Objectives...
At the end of our working sessions together, active participants will be better able to:
- Use frameworks for thinking, coaching templates, and "key question lists" to instigate and explore digital business design approaches.
- Coach their teams (whether in BAM's or dot.com's) in the development of effective portfolio-based, eBusiness strategies as the converging economy unfolds.
- Understand and use a proven, seven-step planning process and eBusiness portfolio tools developed and honed in practice by leading thinkers in the field.
- Better understand and analyze emerging eBusiness Models -- Their customer/market targeting, scope, differentiation approaches, how they capture value, key costs they incur, and their prospects for profitability.
- Be better able to build effective internal marketing initiatives to champion and implement eBusiness strategies
- Design organizational approaches for the implementation of eBusiness strategies across different sorts of firm sizes, environments and cultures.
- Be better equipped as "infomediaries" for their team, workgroup, or firm.
Course Resources:
Text: Net Ready - by world leading researcher, eBusiness Coach, and
practical advisor, Dr. Amir Hartman. Dr. Hartman is in constant contact with
many eBusiness practices, taught Larry Bossidy the meaning of the Internet,
and was the director of internet initiatives at Cisco.
Angel Site: The course will be managed on the
Penn State Angel Site. Information on access to Angel will be available in
the first class.
Course Packet: Especially important in a class where the material is subject
to ongoing update --available at the Student BookStore.
Auxiliary Text: "How Digital is Your Business? By Dr Adrian Slywotsky --not
required, suggested.
By the end of the course you will have:
" A deeper understanding of the potential impact of digital technologies on
the fundamentals of business design - and the characteristics of sound
versus faulty eBusiness design models." An ability to use frameworks to:
- Coach a team into eBusiness thinking processes
- Use a step-by-step framework to develop an eBusiness initiatives portfolio
- Evaluate different business models and approaches for eBusiness
- Build a "business case" for an eBusiness initiative
- Identify and articulate key management issues which arise in implementing eBusiness strategies
- Strategize different organizational approaches to eBusiness implementation
- More effectively do the job of "internally marketing" eBusiness initiatives which involve fundamental change in an organization.
- An appreciation of the legal (taxation, copyright, intellectual property, privacy) issues in the environment in which eBusiness will be conducted.
- An understanding of how to be an effective "infomediary" - getting to the key facts through this rapidly changing environment -- and translating them into actionable insights for your firm.
- Reviewed a variety of cases, which will better enable you to integrate multiple perspectives on why and how the value creation and delivery process in various industries can be transformed by eBusiness.
We'll use a combination of lecture, case discussion, and interactive exercises to hopefully make this course challenging, accessible, exciting, and fun.
This site is for educational purposes and for the advancement of Business to Business Practices. © Ralph Oliva, 2003