现在，每个企业都专注于自己最擅长的，并允许其他组织完整的次要任务。例如，汽车制造商设计和组装汽车，任务，它通常是在执行良好。零件和部分组装项目从专业生产厂家，任务是，汽车制造商通常不进行最好的来源。这使得汽车制造商降低成本，提高效率，提高质量。通过整合与信息系统和汽车制造商的过程中供应商和合约制造商的信息系统，虚拟组织被创建。这个虚拟组织作为一个单一的公司，最终增加值，效率，以及汽车制造商的整体财务表现。
The Internet and the positive experience it creates for customers have increased customer expectations. Customers know that they can receive excellent service and purchase high-quality products at competitive prices online. Exceptional service, high quality, and competitive pricing have become the baselines that consumers use to judge a firm.
Looking at the travel industry, for instance, customers who have traditionally called an airline agent to book a ticket might now go online to research schedule and fares and buy their own airline tickets. They can make these arrangements whenever they want, from wherever they want, without spending any time on the telephone with an agent. Bookings are almost instantaneous, and the power that the customers have to select their preferences is great. Customers can select the dates and times they want to travel, in addition to choosing their preferred airline, their seat number, and whether they want a paper ticket or e-ticket.
电子商务的速度增加。客户更了解产品和可比性，竞争力的产品。产品生命周期越来越短，制造商与其他供应商缩短开发周期，并结合提供了创建新的产品和服务，可以增加竞争优势的合作。企业必须更迅速地应对新兴市场的机会。该压缩的增值服务周期实际上迫使这些组织的合作伙伴，更有效地管理他们的业务流程。
应对全球趋势
互联网和IT正在推动全球经济的深刻变化。变化率可以使它很难为企业跟上。幸运的是，推动变革同样的技术也让企业掌握这种变化。组织都用它来解决全球商业趋势。具体来说，他们都用它来有两个目的：
To integrate disparate internal processes
为了增加与供应商，客户和合作伙伴的协作
This section examines both of these points.
IT can help integrate processes by linking disparate systems. Using networked applications allows companies to do the following:
Increase the efficiency of their business processes
重塑商业模式
重构价值链，它们是活动产生一个值的序列，或特定商品或服务
运营效率已成为一些行业在竞争激烈的关键。通过利用互联网，企业可以通过把信息网上为这些目的而降低成本：
流程自动化
To connect people
To remove administrative costs
To grow profits
To increase margins
一个组织可以通过使用新技术来提高协作功能集成与供应商，客户和合作伙伴的核心业务流程。这减少周期时间和控制成本，使组织可以保持在全球经济中具有竞争力的和可行的。
IT also allows businesses to cope through the promotion of collaboration. By tying together an organization with its suppliers, customers, and partners, costs are reduced, cycle times improved, and customer satisfaction increased.
结论
使用互联网,它增强颈boration even moderately can bring benefits to the organization. For example, a recent study indicated that even moderate levels of external integration, such as allowing customers, suppliers, and partners to view the information for an organization online, cut costs by an average of 14 percent (NerveWire 2002, 14). AsFigure 1-2illustrates, as the level of integration increases, benefits increase. Such benefits allow the organization to remain competitive in a global environment.
Benefits of Increasing Levels of External Integration
There has been massive growth and adoption of the Internet by the public and private sector worldwide in just one short decade. In this section, you learned how the Internet could do the following:
Drive productivity and competitiveness
Affect business in the public and private sectors
Influence current global business trends
Help organizations respond effectively to new trends
You should now have some ideas about how the Internet and IT will affect your organization and how you might compete more effectively in the global economy.
Exercise
In the following space, list some of the ways that the Internet is likely to impact your business. List the ways in which your business can utilize the Internet to improve your operations.
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IT and Its Effect on the Organization
In the previous section, you were introduced to the Internet and some of the ways in which it is impacting the global business environment. You also learned how an organization can utilize the Internet to become more efficient and profitable. This section examines the ways in which IT impacts the organization. You will see how IT can boost productivity, increase efficiency, develop innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance quality.
In this section, you will learn about the positive financial impact that IT can have on an organization, specifically in the following areas within the organization:
Productivity
效率
Innovation
顾客满意度
质量
IT和组织
正如引言中指出，互联网正在摆脱了乌云，这是爆出本世纪头几年的网络泡沫下。这是越来越明显，企业从IT不再分开。事实上，它基本上由IT启用。因此，IT部门必须在提高产生收入的基本业务功能的方式来追求。IT部门可以通过多种方式做到这一点。
The use of Internet-enabled applications allows companies to increase the efficiency of their business processes, reinvent business models, and reconstruct value chains. Organizations are using the Internet for several purposes:
Put information online
Automate processes
Connect people
Reduce administrative costs
提高利润
Increase gross margins
互联网还使组织内的知识集中和核心职能由组织中的任何人进行分配，共享和适应。这使得企业可以为客户提供更好的服务，满足新的市场机遇，迅速适应不断变化的条件，并能够形成虚拟团队，以创造新的价值。从这个网络的情报来自全球的竞争。随着越来越多的竞争，组织效率有待提高，更加注重需求的价值链被投入，使企业将不只是生存，但茁壮成长。
In essence, the use of Internet-enabled applications amplifies the efforts of employees so that they can produce more value for a given amount of work. As a consequence, IT can be thought of as a force multiplier.
IT and Productivity
This notion of force multiplication is at the heart of productivity.Productivityinvolves doing more with fewer resources. In the case of business, it is increasing the revenue generated per employee through the greater ability of employees to deliver goods and services to customers willing to pay for them faster and more efficiently.
IT can enhance productivity by enabling growth and scaling operations. An increase in productivity can be achieved in several ways with IT. For example, reducing delays in the supply chain and sales process of an organization also reduces cycle time. Therefore, the organization can create more products in less time, which translates into increased output and revenues.
IT enriches productivity by enabling employees to acquire and retain satisfied customers. IT also enables an increase in the production of goods and services for better revenues at improved margins. Each of these activities, prior to the Internet, had a force multiplier of 1. That is, one employee could only do what one employee was capable of accomplishing with his own knowledge and resources. With Internet-enabled IT, force multiplication is well beyond 10 to 1 compared to business processes that are not IT enabled. For some industries, the force multiplier can be in excess of 100. No end is in sight to the force multiplier as firms integrate technology with business processes. With productivity increases of 3 percent or more per year, this compounding will double the overall force multiplication in less than 24 years. By the end of the century, IT-enabled productivity gains will increase productivity by more than 1500 percent.
However, productivity gains by themselves do not create profitable companies. A company can be extremely productive and still go out of business. More is needed.
IT and Efficiency
Another requirement of a successful business is efficiency. What this means in practice is that the company needs to utilize its means of production in ways that maximize the output for a given input. Unlike productivity, which seeks to maximize the output in absolute terms, efficiency seeks high productivity with minimum extraneous cost. Efficiency is high productivity with minimum waste.
IT shines in the efficiency department. With Internet-enabled IT, companies can track their business processes, inputs, and outputs to reduce process time, decrease waste, and maximize throughput. IT does this by simplifying and automating transactions and by involving the customers in the delivery of goods and services by enabling them to conduct their own transactions.
IT can improve efficiency by reducing or avoiding costs related to head count, materials, travel, transaction time to completion, and transaction costs. Internet-enabled applications that are focused on the reduction of administrative tasks can decrease the cost and advance the efficiencies of administrative staff to process applications and remove human latency and potential for errors. As shown inFigure 1-3, organizations lower the cost of sales and order fulfillment by linking internal systems and processes from order entry to delivery.
效率Through Automation
然而，一块是从业务方程缺少的。如前所述，在二十一世纪企业的业务是知识产权，或好的创意创作。正如彼得·德鲁克（创新与企业家精神, 1985) noted, intellectual property can be thought of as a direct replacement for capital, money, and labor. As the dot-com has illustrated, small companies armed with good ideas can outperform much larger companies.
生产和application of good ideas is innovation.
What Is Innovation?
In practice,innovationis the process of making practical use of an invention or good idea to do the following:
Produce new products or services
Improve existing products or services
Improve the way in which products or services are produced or distributed
创新来获取竞争优势或社会效益。从企业的角度来看，但是，创新是燃料驱动创收。很少有企业可以期望生产同样的产品同样的价格任何时间长度。全球竞争必须确保选手将表面可以做同样的事情更便宜，更快，更好。
It is the concept of innovation that is the most powerful influence in business. Even if a company chooses not to innovate, innovation will still take place within the competitive market because competition forces innovation. At the very least, a company must match its competition to remain in business. To do so, it will either innovate or adopt the innovation of its competitors. No other alternatives exist.
创新是在新产品和服务（产品创新），产品和服务（应用创新），其中商品和服务的生产（工艺创新）方式的应用，并在所有这些事情都是这样发展的隐管理（业务流程创新）。
IT and Innovation
Just as IT is essential to productivity and efficiency, it is proving to be critical to the innovation process. The Internet and IT are driving innovation in these ways:
By enabling companies to create unique products and services by combining offers over the web
By enabling customers to customize products ordered over the Internet
By creating a unique customer experience by providing multiple channels and tools to buy products and receive services
By enabling businesses to differentiate customer value propositions (for example, leasing versus buying, online coupons, or combined offers)
Innovation and Efficiency Case Example
The use of IT allows organizations to adopt and develop innovative technology, which in turn gives them a competitive advantage.
例如，沃尔玛，一个巨大的美国零售商，投资于IT来创建复杂的信息网络。如图Figure 1-4,网络供应商直接联系公司sales information from its thousands of stores. This allowed Wal-Mart to record, analyze, and manage product inventory information immediately. Wal-Mart was able to order only what it needed from its suppliers, thus keeping inventory costs down and bringing sales up. In the past, with a disparate system, Wal-Mart was not able to track this kind of activity in a timely manner.
