Ebusiness Planning How the Internet Is Changing

EBusiness Planning

How the Internet Is Changing eBusiness Planning

The role of the Internet continues to be both an accelerator and disruptive force that is changing the ebusiness planning aspects of global businesses today. The motivation, processes and outcomes of ebusiness planning are discussed and analyzed in this paper. Of the many facets of how disruptive the speed of innovation is on the Internet, the role of real-time analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) continues to be the most significantly seen in ebusiness planning cycles (Todd, 2008). Analytics and BI applications and the platforms supporting them are making it possible to discern trends and the impacts of financial decisions with greater clarity and speed than ever before (Phillips, 2004). This is changing the motivation, processes and outcomes of planning.

eBusiness Planning: Achieving Strategic Focus With Real-Time Analytics

The motivation for ebusiness planning has completely changed in the last generation of strategic thought leaders and practitioners, shifting from the highly structured and static to the agile and fluid. This has been helped along at a very fast pace by the availability of more digitally-based data on marketing performance (Hair, 2007) and the ability to integrate real-time feedback loops into the planning process itself (Cameron, 2006). The motivation for planning then isn't to create such a pervasive framework that is constricts movement of strategies and plans; it is however to create a business model and associated planning constructs that allow for rapid agility and the ability to pivot strategies (Todd, 2008). An example of a company with this willingness to completely re-order their strategic planning process, with a strong motivation to achieve agility is IBM. Instead of staying complacent in their mainframe business, IBM today generates well over 50% of their revenue from their software and services businesses that are heavily reliant on advanced Internet-based technologies (Cameron, 2006). IBM continues to push itself to higher levels of performance using these technologies as a means to penetrate new, high growth markets.

The processes of ebusiness strategic planning are also getting disrupted heavily by the Internet and its real-time nature of data and analytics (Phillips, 2004). This continues to accelerate with the use of real-time analytics to unify strategic planning processes directly to sales cycles (Cameron, 2006). The nature of the ebusiness strategic planning process has transitioned from the periodic to the continuous; from the static to the agile and fluid (Kannabiran, Sundar, 2011).