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Chapter 5 E-business strategy 269

Events

Knowledge
Feedback building and Key
capability insights
evaluation

Applications E-business
development design
and (business
deployment goals)

E-business
blueprint Key
Priorities
(planning objectives
applications)

Dynamic e-business strategy model
Figure 5.5
Source: Adapted from description in Kalakota and Robinson (2000)

Strategic analysis

Strategic analysis Strategic analysis or situation analysis involves review of:
Collection and review of
information about an the internal resources and processes of the company to assess its e-business capabilities
organization’s internal and results to date in the context of a review of its activity in the marketplace;
processes and resources
and external marketplace the immediate competitive environment (micro-environment), including customer
factors in order to inform demand and behaviour, competitor activity, marketplace structure and relationships with
strategy definition.
suppliers, partners and intermediaries as described in Chapter 2;
the wider environment (macro-environment) in which a company operates; this includes

economic development and regulation by governments in the form of law and taxes
together with social and ethical constraints such as the demand for privacy. These macro-
environment factors, including the social, legal, economic and political factors, were
reviewed in Chapter 4 and are not considered further in this chapter.

The elements of situation analysis for an e-business are summarized in Figure 5.6. For the
effective, responsive e-business, as explained earlier, it is essential that situation analysis or
environmental scanning be a continuous process with clearly identified responsibilities for
performing the scanning and acting on the knowledge acquired.
In this section we start with the internal perspective of how a company currently uses
technology and then we review the competitive environment.

Resource and process analysis
Resource analysis
Review of the
technological, financial Resource analysis for e-business is primarily concerned with its e-business capabilities, i.e.
and human resources of the degree to which a company has in place the appropriate technological and applications
an organization and how infrastructure and financial and human resources to support it. These resources must be har-
they are utilized in
business processes. nessed together to give efficient business processes.