DB2 UDB's High-Function Business Intelligence in e-business

Chapter 1. Business Intelligence overview 5

򐂰 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which has to do with managing the

bread-and-butter processes of an organization from planning, manufacturing,

inventory, shipping/distribution, accounting and human resources.

򐂰 Workgroup collaboration, which has to do with sharing of resources and

information amongst an organizations employees such as E-mail, meetings,

document sharing, etc. Field Force Automation improves the productivity of

employees in the field (salesman, technical support/maintenance persons,

and delivery personnel) and improves customer satisfaction and

responsiveness.

򐂰 Business Intelligence (BI) which has to do with collecting and analyzing

business information from a multitude of internal and external sources

for competitive advantage.

򐂰 Knowledge Management (KM), which has to do with combining and matching

information and personnel skills to great effect.

By extending the reach of an organization's business critical systems using

Internet technologies, the opportunity exists to gain significant competitive

advantage by transforming:

򐂰 Employees — from competent to responsive individuals

򐂰 Customers — from one time interaction to lifetime loyalty through mass

personalization instead of mass marketing

򐂰 Suppliers and distributors — from independence to interdependence

1.1.1 Impact of e-business

IT organizations have long understood their mission to support the applications

required to meet business objectives via an infrastructure that delivers

acceptable performance, availability, security, integrity and access to its user

community. Most business organizations today have successfully implemented

such infrastructures on private networks for their user community consisting of

primarily their worldwide employees.

However, e-business results in the addition of customers, suppliers and

distributors to the user community mix over the Internet, as well as intranets and

extranets, accessing business critical systems. This is because the user

community is now potentially global (requiring 7x24 operation), multi-lingual,

Important: When an organization connects its business critical systems

directly to customers, suppliers, distributors and employees in order to gain a

competitive advantage, it transforms the organization and becomes an

e-business.

6 High-Function Business Intelligence in e-business

generally use a browser interface on a multiplicity of client platforms, have a lot of

concerns over security and privacy, and can generate unpredictable workloads.

Customers in particular have choices (they are just a mouse-click away from

going over to the competition) and expect rapid response and superior service.

Figure 1-3 e-business impact

This has the potential to add orders of magnitude of complexity to the challenges

of managing the demands of the exploding user community. e-business

therefore exacerbates an already challenging situation.

e-business Impact

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