1. A description of major areas/thrusts in eBusiness
2. A description of the area of Business Intelligence with appropriate references and illustrations
3. CRM success stories

A description of major areas/thrusts in eBusiness
There are many drives associated with eBusiness. It is important to stay on top of key issues in planning and implementing strategies. The following are a few key elements in achieving eBusiness success.

Information/Knowledge Management

• Because there is so much information provided over the Internet, it is important for firms to know how to manage such vast amounts of information. If they are able to do so, then knowledge can be shared and therefore balance workloads.

• You cannot just have isolated applications and databases. You must integrate each one into your organization. A firm relies on many different resources, however they must be inter-connected within the organization in order to be effective. Doing so will provide a firm with cost-efficient implementation of powerful business processes such as Consumer Relationship Management (CRM). Also, a well-integrated business infrastructure can overcome negative outcomes result from changes within the organization.

• Information networks are now more critical than ever. This is due to the recent increase in demand for powerful transaction solutions. If your firm can adapt well to all of these changes, then you can profit from many capabilities such as fast response time and high availablility.

• Firms must meet customer expectations. Although customers do not care about the complexity of the technology, they do expect quality results. In order to achieve these types of results, companies must engage in complex applications. However, since technology is so advanced these days, customers will not tolerate any inconveniences.

• Creating new eBusiness applications must be a relatively quick process. Some factors that must be considered are availability, security, and interoperability.

• As people enter this market, scalability can hurt performance, availbility and response time.

• Security and Privacy can both be considered threats in eBusiness. As technology advances and computers start to take the place of humans, people are finding ways to beat the system.

• With more and more wireless availability, firms are finding more opportunities to explore.

A description of the area of Business Intelligence with appropriate references and illustrations

In the past decade, the new wave of the Internet has exploded, industries now face an increasing number of competitors, larger volumes of data, and a growing number of customers. In order for firms to maximize their potential, it is vital to incorporate new technology that can cope with this increase in demand. With the new wave of the World Wide Web, companies are faced with more customer data than ever before. It has become apparent that Business Intelligence plays a key role in managing this new generation of technology.

Business Intelligence can help companies today in many different ways.

1. BI is useful in trying to understand what drives business. For example, what behaviors/trends are present within the industry? From this information, firms can better predict future behavior.
2. Once firms have decided on what to measure, BI can set certain expectations for employees and from there, they can manage their own performance. For example, firms use a budgeting process based on previous periods. This allows a company to save time put that energy into something else.
3. BI helps improve relationships between stakeholders. With the Internet, outsiders can readily access information about the enterprise. Problems can be quickly identified and thus corrected if possible.
4. BI creates a profit opportunity for firms. By capturing information over the Web, companies can deliver this for a certain price. However, there is a great challenge in determining who will buy this information and how they will actually deliver it.

CRM success stories

Cerreker (Peoplesoft)

Carreker Corportaion was a software consulting company that was faced with an increase in growth but not enough resources to support this growth. One of the biggest challenges that they were facing was that of examining performance. Since everything was moving at such a fast pace, it was hard to analyze one sector of the company. Once they aquired the services of PeopleSoft, they were able to integrate certain databases into their system and therefore learn more about their customer needs. Customers were able to access data from anywhere, anytime on the Internet. This PeopleSoft solution has helped Carreker get a better view of what exactly their customers are looking for. This has brought in a significant amount of growth and efficientcy.

Pepsi America (Peoplesoft)

PepsiAmerica was searching for a way deal with the increasing number of products, distribution gaps, large haul-backs, and lost promotion opportunities. In order to do this, they needed to separate selling and delivery. PeopleSoft was able to integrate a CRM solution that would allow PepsiAmerica to get a better feel of their customers needs and wants. In addition to the 360-degree view of their customers, PepsiAmerica could also get a better feel of potential sales opportunities. This was done through customer research that the CRM offered.

Thomson Financial (Peoplesoft)

Thomson Financial was interested in getting a better understanding of what products their customers were most interested in. This $2 billion compnay hired PeopleSoft as a means to integrate a CRM solution. They wanted to become a pure Internet CRM. This way, customers could access any information they want, at any time they needed.

Taylor Made/Adidas Golf (Kana Software)

Taylor Made/Adidas Golf uses CRM to manage customer email. A database is used to
suggest appropriate responses to customer inquiries, and the answers to technical questions are shared among the customer service representatives to increase response time. Further, the system provides managers with a better way to monitor how representatives are responding to customer email.

Beneficial Life Insurance Company (Oracle)

Beneficial Life Insurance Company uses CRM to provide a holistic view of the customer.
Representatives are able to view information about all of the policies a customer has, when
they expire, and what previous contacts the customer has had. As a result, Beneficial Life
reports that it has been able to double the number of customer service calls resolved on first contact and provide a quicker turnaround time on transactions. In addition, Beneficial Life has reported that employee voluntary turnover has declined from 18% to 12%, reducing the time and expense of training new employees.

City of Lynchburg, Virginia (IBM)

The City of Lynchburg uses CRM to open the lines of communication between 1,100
municipal employees in 11 departments who interact with outside agencies, city councils,
and the general public. Further, a customer service module allows a call center to quickly
capture citizen inquiries, assign them to the appropriate department or specialist, and track the progress of the inquiry. The City reports that citizens began calling in more compliments than complaints.

Fed Ex (AvantGo)

Fed Ex has successfully used wireless CRM solutions for nearly 20 years. By using
handheld scanners to communicate data on the location and status of packages, Fed Ex has
increased the productivity of its couriers by two and one-half times. In addition, the package information is published to all of its customer touchpoints, call centers, the web, and wireless devices, in order to improve customer service.