E-business

Vision 2010 uses the term 'e-business' (rather than e-commerce &c.) to emphasise that our concerns are with business-to-business relations. It encompasses not just the strictly commercial side of relationships but also the complex communications between the networked companies and virtual organisations of the future.

In the context of looking at the future of purchasing and supply, Vision 2010 does not make any detailed forecasts or predictions of the future of e-business. However the Expert Group took the following three points as being almost axiomatic:

E-business will:

be the usual method for most businesses to acquire the majority of the goods that they buy;
rely on common security and other standards developed to ease trade, with a few software platforms dominating;
almost without exception use Internet technology, (including extranets, intranets and virtual private nets), rather than dedicated links.

During the span of time covered by Vision 2010 the Internet itself is likely to be superseded by technology enabling much larger volumes of data to be exchanged much more quickly. This will further accelerate the changes highlighted above.

The 'Five-Force' model of the competitive environment can be used to analyse the effects that e-business will have on competition between organisations (see The Five-Force Model of the competitive environment).

Figure 7: The Five-Force Model of the competitive environment

Six barriers to the entry of firms into an already-existing market have been identified. The table on the right summarises the likely effects on these barriers of the widespread adoption of e-business.

Figure 8: Barriers to entering into e-business

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