In developing an e-business plan, it is essential to address the extent of change to existing office equipment, systems and procedures that might be required or desired.

The threat of the year 2000 bug and the introduction of GST forced many businesses to upgrade computer equipment and introduce new work practices. So too with e-business. For example, often businesses find that the introduction of taking orders by email or paying suppliers via the Web means that they have to adjust their accounting procedures and their customer record-keeping.

One of the most common integration issues is that of databases. Does an existing database of products, customers, members or suppliers stay in the same program (eg in Microsoft AccessT"') and format (eg the same field names) with its data transferred from time-to-time to the website? Or, should the database be overhauled, new fields added, content cleaned up so that it is accurate and then made an integral part of the website rather than sitting on someone's computer in the office? This latter solution has many advantages.

What to do  

Whoever is developing the e-business plan needs to approach any key stakeholders and everyone in the business who carries out day-to-day business operations to:

• ensure they understand how the Internet could be of assistance - eg explain about online databases, online forms, e-commerce, email ordering
• ask in what ways the Internet could be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business tasks.

That person should then:

• collate the responses, and for those that indicate an improvement could be made, determine what the integration challenges are and the likely benefits
• summarise the findings and then determine what equipment, systems and processes should be amended to take advantage of e-business, and how that should be done.

 e-businessguide Case Study - Betros Bros (30 kb)

 e-businessguide Case Study - The Perfect Cup (462 kb)

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