E-business essay
E-business refers to the use of integrated information technology (using the internet) by a business organization to perform its core activities (Anon, 2019). Hence the E-business activities involve the use of the internet to carry out a business transaction online. For effective and efficient e-business, several considerations have to be analyzed when the e-commerce for a given company is on designing stage. This helps the architecture for the e-business structure to make effective decisions on items that will be separated or integrated into the e-business. This mostly is based on the business activities carried out by the business organization and also the market coverage that the business intends to covers (Grefen, 2015). Hence, the tension field between the separation and integration when designing or analyzing e-business is more on the scale. This is whereby the architecture involved in designing of an e-business platform for a given organization has to consider the need to combine or separate a given activity from one another for effective and efficient use of the e-business platform by both customers and the employees of such business organization.
The object of the e-business is also another field of tension when analyzing e-business space. E-business objective varies from one business to another (Grefen, 2015). For instance, there is e-business that deals with physical goods, while other e-commerce deals with digital information or data. In the analysis of e-business, integration of customer services in the business that deals with digital information will be sufficient to serve the customers better since the customers can view the information confidentially and make a transaction where possible. For instance, customers in a share market are in a position to see the prices of shares from different companies and buy them online (Kauremaa & Tanskanen, 2016). But in a business that deals with physical goods, customers can only view the products online and make their orders, but the shipping or supply or the products have to take place. Hence, placing of law and access to the physical product has to be separated in such e-business.
The user levels in e-business is also another field of tension when determining separation and integration of e-business, (Redbooks.ibm.com, 2019). For instance, if there are more than two levels of customers taking part in a given e-business, there is always a need to consider the satisfactory levels of such customers. For instance, e-business that handles information from individuals as well as from big organizations. In such e-business, there is always a need to separate the access of services between the two levels of customers (Kauremaa & Tanskanen, 2016). This is because integrating the service access to such customers may create jam as large organizations may be handling large scale data compared to individual customers.
The business pattern is also another field of tension when analyzing and designing e-business. For instance, a self-service business pattern that involves users interacting with the business directly through the internet may require integration of services provided that the information or data of other customers secure, (Grefen, 2015). The integrated service in the self-service business pattern saves time and is also cost-effective to the business (Redbooks.ibm.com, 2019). On the other hand, companies that have collaboration patterns that are described as a user to user pattern may need separation of services as customers have to make inquiries from other users on the different platforms. Hence the form of e-business involved is universal e-business whereby coverage is not limited to other users. In this way, services have to be separated since each user/customer has to navigate as they tried to access other users of can offer specific services on demand.