Data for Competitive Advantage
In this fiercely competitive global economy, enterprises, world wide, are focused on transforming all their physical business processes into interconnected and integrated "electronic" processes to gain competitive advantage. The internal enterprise back office systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are increasingly being connected to customers, to suppliers, and to business partner systems, creating an integrated value-chain to accelerate time to value and delight the customer. An enterprise whose business processes are integrated end-to-end across the company, with key partners, suppliers and customers can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external competitive threat.
At the back end, are business-to-business servers. managing business relationships that are being created around integrated supply chain management (SCM) or partner value-nets.
At the front end are customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructures, not only a Web activity with business-to-consumer (B2C) kinds of e-commerce servers, but also collecting information about customers and their buying behavior, from every touch point that you have with a customer, whether it be a call center, a Web site, or a contact at a physical location.
This is what we mean by “e-business”. It's really replacing all of these physical linkages and processes - that we do every day - with integrated, electronic processes to gain competitive advantage.
This end to end electronic process integration requires that enterprises bring together all forms of digitized information to fuel today’s e-business transactions. An ERP, SCM and commerce systems need access to all forms of information, such as an order (structured data) or purchase contract (unstructured information). Similarly, a CRM application needs access to all contacts a customer may have made - a transaction reflected in a database (structured data), an e-mail sent on a service issue (unstructured information), or an accounts payable statement sent in hard copy (unstructured information). Further, enterprises need to mine this vast amount of information, collected and stored in corporate data warehouses. This information can then be used for customer preferences, wants and needs or to design new products and services to delight customers. This growing need for business efficiency, such as accelerating time to value and gaining competitive advantage, drives requirements to store, manage, analyze and provide seamless access to information across the enterprise (and beyond to suppliers, partners and customers). These customer requirements are the under pinning of IBM DB2's e-business strategy.
