E-Business
Issue No. 1 - July/August 2001
e-nough
by David Twiss
At a recent Harvard Business School Alumni gathering a banner hanging on the wall bore words to the effect of “We’ve learnt the lessons from the bust. The basics are important.” The principles of what makes good business didn’t change, we just forgot them for a while.
What has been going on behind the spectacular boom and bust, however, is innovation — companies just quietly getting on with it, without much hoopla, searching out and adopting technology based solutions to real world problems and gaining real business benefit.
I believe all successful businesses are driven by innovative opportunists. Don’t get me wrong; I applaud opportunism in business. That is, I approve of being constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to improve business profitability, be it through developing new markets, forming strategic alliances, increasing market penetration or simply reducing costs. Why is it that when it comes to adopting technology for business benefit we are often very slow?
Oracle saved US$1 billion last year by revolutionising their internal systems. That’s not to say the systems issues facing a corporate giant like Oracle have much in common with most South Australian companies, but I think all of us can benefit by being more opportunistically innovative when it comes to applying technology in our businesses.
One size fits all? Not at all. A big company probably already has computer-based systems for marketing, sales, supply chain, manufacturing, customer service, accounting, human resources and other functions. A small company might have just acquired its first computer and business package; typically MYOB or QuickBooks to do the accounts.
In each case the opportunities are different.
For a larger company with existing systems making their existing systems ‘talk to one another’ is often a substantial and costly challenge. Enterprise application integration (EAI) contin...
