Preparation Notes

Workshop 6:

Virtual Communities & e-Business

Findings

Introduction

Virtual communities are usually establish in order for people in all over the world the communicate and exchange interest. On the other hand, e-business does have a distinct influence from virtual communities, as it has more or less altered the way business handled their work. Many have predicted that there would be a precedent shift in power from vendors to customers, as the advancement of technologies has allowed boundaries of connections to be boundless.

Elements of Analytical Framework for e-Business Models

The few major elements of the analytical framework are defined below:-

Coordination Issues

Coordination is defined as the management of dependencies among activities. Dependencies reflect the interconnections between the resources and the activities for the business. Each dependencies has several coordination mechanisms to resolve the limitation and problems that arises from business works. Chosen coordination process affects they way the business is carried out.

Collective Competition

The study of cooperation and competition within the market is essential. Inability to understand your competitors can affect the boundaries of organization. As a result, several companies that were competitors has merged or work hand-in-hand to obtain distinctive advantages in the industry by utilizing the benefits of communication and information technologies tools.

Customer Value

Activities of an organization are usually done to achieve the ultimate goal - to serve the customers. As a result, the business has to use customers as the compass to plan what to do, and how to provide customers the best for them. Hence, understanding customers needs plays an essential role in both e-business and traditional business model.

Core Competence

Core competencies are firm-specific skills and cognitive traits directed towards the attainment of the highest possible level of customers satisfaction. Competencies contributes to the company's economic development through exploitation of strengths and opportunities it faces.

Evolution of E-Business

The evolution of e-business can be divided into a few phrases. The first phrase occur during the early 90s, the Internet was used primarily for information dissemination via email and static Web pages. The Internet was a complementary information channel to magazines, radio and TV for distributing product information. The transfer of information, then, was lack of security and integrity.

The second phrase take place from the mid 90s to the late 90s, security and privacy protocols were being a concern value added transaction processing services. Hence, it has opened it gate doors to commercial and corporate usage. The development of the e-business has mixed the Internet infrastructure with the traditional business culture together.

The current phrase of e-business is connecting the development of intelligent technologies like data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP) and sophisticated search engines together. These technologies are used to create product and user profiles, and also to adapt the behavior of the e-business system, which requires development of new interfaces and business models. Hence, technologies has change the both the computing and business world by linking them together.

Issues

 

The issues that raised from the above research on virtual communities and e-business are stated below:-

• How do e-business change the traditional shopping culture?

• Can e-business change the traditional shopping behavior?

• Do people benefit from e-business? Who and How?

• What are the models of e-business?

• How are will the future of the e-business be?

 

References

 

	Quality	Titles & Authors
	****	Building e-Business Models: An Analytical Framework and Development Guidelines
	***	Virtual Communities: Linking People and Market Electronically - Paula M.C. Swatman, Andy Bytheway, Marina Cavill, Joan Cooper & W. David Wilde
	***	The Covered Bazaar on the Internet: Culturally Specific Alternatives to "Web Marts" - Fay Sudweek & Simeon J. Simoff
	***	Designing and Evaluating E-Business Models - Jaap Gordijn & Hans Akkermans
	***	The Community Benefits of Electronic Networking
	**	Benefits of Networking

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