What is eBusiness anyway?

Other that one of the most used and abused management buzzwords of the last decade??

eBusiness (not to be confused with eCommerce) is how we use technology, and particularly distributed technologies like the Internet, throughout our business, not just for sales, but also for information dissemination, internal and external communication, documentation, business processes and general information management.

As we head towards the second decade of the 21st century - with the pervasive nature of technology within our businesses - eBusiness has become just plain old business - the way we do things around here. 

Innovation in eBusiness

Technology is a tool. It is an enabler. It allows us to leverage our existing capabilities to be truly innovative, to think outside the box and create new opportunities.

Having the same Desktop Dinosaur, with the same operating system, with the same software as everybody else on the planet is NOT innovation.

Paying for some technology vendor to change your business processes to fit their view of how those systems should work, and to dictate how you interact with your markets is NOT innovation.

Look into the really big names in eBusiness - eBay, YouTube, Google - and even the Internet itself. Innovative? Absolutely. And all of them have got to where they are today built on robust, secure, thoroughly supported, tried and tested open technologies.

Redskink always supports a pragmatic approach to business - whatever gets us to our goals - but at what time did we allow it to get to the point where we are tied to one software vendor, a point where their current offering is so terrible, that they are offering at our cost, the opportunity to go back to the old version and we are meekly holding out our hands and accepting it??

Thankfully, for the willing and open-minded, there are alternatives.

The menu on the left contains a few ideas that deliberately challenge the way we look at technology in our businesses.