Electronic Business and Commerce
Course Perspective
We are living in an extraordinary time and place. The Internet and related technologies have caused the costs of certain kinds of interactions and transactions to plummet. As a consequence, new ways of managing, communicating and trading have been opened up. As with any dramatic technological change, the most obvious effects are incremental: we find easier and less costly ways of doing the things we used to do anyway. Over time, however, there are changes that are non-incremental. We discover that we can do entirely new things, or completely restructure the ways in which we do the things we used to do.
Over time, the current technological change will have a large impact on organizations, business transactions and relationships. Firms can be managed in new ways, new channels are being created, entire supply chains are being reengineered, and so too are the industries and firms that participate in them. That is what this course is about. Our goal is to ruminate together about the changes that are likely to be wrought on firms, supply chains and industries, and to inform our discussions wherever possible with insights from conceptual frameworks to guide us.
We will focus on the way firms, markets, transactions and supply chains can take advantage of these changes, and how we can cope with them. We will try to look beyond the hype and analyze the threats and opportunities presented by the Internet for firms of all sizes.
This course is not about start-ups. We will take the perspective that traditional companies are going to shape E-Business landscape as they bring their existing strategic assets to bear. They face tremendous challenges in doing so, and how they deal with those challenges is something we will discuss. This does not mean that the course is irrelevant to start-ups. Quite the contrary is true. First, we will look at a number of startup businesses in a number of areas. Further, any start-up needs to understand the environment in which it will be situated in order to identify and evaluate its opportunities in the first place. The course will be very relevant to an opportunity analysis. However, we will not spend much time on the process by which you take an idea to market, which is the subject of our various entrepreneurship courses.
Electronic Business is having a big impact on how firms are organized and behave in addition to how transactions occur, and parts of the course will focus on the level of the firm and its internal architecture. Electronic Commerce is a subset of Electronic Business that focuses on what happens outside the boundaries of the firm. It examines inter-firm interactions and how markets, supply chains and entire industries are transformed through the use of Information Technology and the Internet. In the course, we will be examining different pieces of this transformation as well as what happens within the firm itself.
Course Objectives
Some objectives for the course are as follows:
1. Developing an understanding of the value of Electronic Business.
2. Developing an understanding of the forces shaping Electronic Business and Commerce.
3. Developing tools for thinking through the impact of Electronic Business on firms, industries and supply chains.
4. Gaining practice in looking for opportunities in rapidly changing markets.
5. Developing habits of orderly, analytical thinking and skill in analyzing business models and reporting conclusions.
In addition, consumers will transact with one another in "CSC" markets that we will examine.
Course Outline
Session 1: Value of IT
Course Overview, "Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines"
Session 2: Changing the Business Model
Schwab.com
Session 3: Commerce Logistics
Webvan: The New and Improved Milkman
Session 4: Inter-Enterprise E-Commerce
SRS
Session 5: eMarkets
e_Markets 2000
Session 6: Global New Ventures
Medica
Session 7: Mobile Portals
Wireless Applications Primer; i-Mode: Reinventing the Wireless
Session 8: P2P Payments
a-axF-a1; Payments in the United States
Session 9: Information Management
7-Eleven Japan
Final Project Due
