E-Intelligence

Abstract

As corporations move rapidly toward deploying e-business systems, the lack of business intelligence facilities in these systems prevents decision-makers from exploiting the full potential of the Internet as a sales, marketing, and support channel.

To solve this problem, vendors are rapidly enhancing their business intelligence offerings to capture the data flowing through e-business systems and integrate it with the information that traditional decision-making systems manage and analyze. These enhanced business intelligence-or e-intelligence-systems may provide significant business benefits to traditional brick-and-mortar companies as well as new dot-com ones as they build e-business environments.
Organizations have been successfully using decision-processing products, including data warehouse and business intelligence tools, for the past several years to optimize day-to-day business operations and to leverage enterprise-wide corporate data for a competitive advantage. The advent of the Internet and corporate extranets has propelled many of these organizations toward the use of e-business applications to further improve business efficiency, decrease costs and increase revenues - and to compete with new dot.com companies appearing in the marketplace.
The explosive growth in the use of e-business has led to the need for decision-processing systems to be enhanced to capture and integrate business information flowing through e-business systems. These systems also need to be able to apply business intelligence techniques to this captured-business information. These enhanced decision processing systems, or E-Intelligence, have the potential to provide significant business benefits to both traditional bricks-and-mortar companies and new dot.com companies as they begin to exploit the power of e-business processing.

E-INTELLIGENCE FOR BUSINESS

E-intelligence systems provide internal business users, trading partners, and corporate clients rapid and easy access to the e-business information, applications, and services they need in order to compete effectively and satisfy customer needs. They offer many business benefits to organizations in exploiting the power of the Internet. For example, e-intelligence systems give the organization the ability to:
1. Integrate e-business operations into the traditional business environment, giving business users a complete view of all corporate business operations and information.
2. Help business users make informed decisions based on accurate and consistent e-business information that is collected and integrated from e-business applications.This business information helps business users optimize Web-based offerings (products offered, pricing and promotions, service and support, and so on) to match marketplace requirements and analyze business performance with respect to competitors and the organization's business-performance objectives.
3. Assist e-business applications in profiling and segmenting e-business customers. Based on this information, businesses can personalize their Web pages and the products and services they offer.

4. Extend the business intelligence environment outside the corporate firewall, helping the organization share internal business information with trading partners. Sharing this information will let it optimize the product supply chain to match the demand for products sold through the Internet and minimizes the costs of maintaining inventory.
5. Extend the business intelligence environment outside the corporate firewall to key corporate clients, giving them access to business information about their accounts. With this information, clients can analyze and tune their business relationships with other organization, improving client service and satisfaction.
6. Link e-business applications with business intelligence and collaborative processing applications, allowing internal and external users to seamlessly move among different systems.

INTELLIGENT E-SERVICES

The building blocks of new, sophisticated, intelligent data warehousing applications are now intelligent e-services. An e-service is any asset made available via the Internet to drive new revenue streams or create new efficiencies. What makes e-services valuable is not only the immediacy of the service, but also the intelligence behind the service. While traditional data warehousing meant simple business rules, simple queries and pro-active work to take advantage of the Web, E-Intelligence is much more sophisticated and enables the Web to work on our behalf. Combining intelligence with e-services promises exciting business opportunities.