What is eBusiness?

The Internet as a fundamental platform of worldwide eBusiness has emerged both as the world’s major distribution channel for goods and services and as its platform for international cooperation between business partners. The term can be defined as 'doing business electronically in support of organizational goals'. An enterprise is doing eBusiness when:

• It communicates electronically with the outside world; 
• It sells products or services via a website; 
• It uses the Web to find information; 
• It uses the Web for research; 
• It uses a website to provide information; 
• It uses the Internet for online banking and for paying its bills.

eBusiness is more than just technology and thus affecting how companies view their strategy and operations. Most businesses start by communicating via email, a website and an intranet. These form the foundation for a company's eBusiness strategy and create a basis from which an improved business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationships can be established.

Expertise from both business and ICT should be used. What we mean by this is that eBusiness should be business rather than technology driven. Incorporating ICT technology into core business processes enables new levels of relationships to be established with your customers, suppliers and partners.

The main areas eBusiness can maximize business value are: customer relationships, supply chain management and e-commerce. By using ICT technology, these three business-critical processes can be transformed into a single, streamlined system controlled by anyone at anytime.