Successful e-business implementation.

Making you business go online may not be as easy as it may seem. In general nearly 70 percent of the e-businesses are never successful because they lack proper planning and are built around unreasonable and unrealistic expectations. The ebusiness technology is often assumed to be a heaped spoon of miracle, and is expected to pull in fast and unimaginably big revenue.

Though ebusiness promises gains in productivity while cutting down the costs, yet these promises become immaterial with improper management and implementation of the e-business solutions. In most failure cases the management is to be blamed. Commonly failures arise due to reasons like inability to understand the actual scale of the project, unreasonable expectations, low or no resource commitment and oversimplifying the project. These all have their origin in the inability of the management, and they go on to hamper the implementation and proper usage of the ebusiness solution. This article will guide you through the problems that make an ebusiness unproductive.

• The people who are to use the system may be skeptic about the capability of the system. This generally is a result of insufficient knowledge about the solution that is imparted to these people. A way out could be to impart them with knowledge and training to build up faith in them about the system. Or else the productivity is bound to suffer thereby escalating the implementation costs. This is one of the more common scenarios seen at the implementation stage of the ebusiness solutions.

• The senior management may not devote enough time and efforts to get learn and comprehend the solution well enough. As a result they may have the least idea about how well would the workers at the lower end accept and accommodate the new ebusiness solution being implemented. The senior management must first understand the system and then design ways to make the system more acceptable to the workers.

• It is often seen that the end users or the actual users are not provided with the required training. So they are not able to use the system in the right way leading to confusion and eventually to the workers avoiding its use.

• The business may not be equipped with sufficient and required IT infrastructure to support the successful implementation and use of the solution.

• The management may not understand the concept and the requirements of the ebusiness solution, thus the amount of budget they may allocate for the installation and implementation of the solution may not be appropriate, generally being much below the required budget.

• They business may have an old existing systems which may fail to work in coordination with the new solution in question. The solution software may not be very compatible with the existing systems, so making it nearly impossible to successfully implement the e-business solution.

Here is a list of things the business can do to avoid these problems and facilitate successful implementation of the e-business solution.

• E-business solutions are related to some of the more crucial areas of the business, especially they serve as a link between the business and the customer, thus may require additional efforts and more care to implement and use. It is best to have a detailed plan devised up to successfully implement the solution.

• When developing the extensive plan, you simply cannot afford to keep the actual users at bay, rather have them involved from the very conception of the plan. The planning must also involve the technical and business experts.

• When laying out a plan some issues to consider are:

1. What is the basic objective behind the implementation of the e-business solution That is, what exactly does the business wish to achieve by using this system.

2. What are the key issues the solution aims to resolve

3. How justified is the use and implementation of the solution considering the amount of time spent and the expenditure incurred

4. What are the targets to be achieved and how will the business evaluate whether the targets are being met or not

5. Who will be the key people involved in the mission and what will be their specific roles in the entire solution implementation That is who will be responsible for what, as also who would report to whom. An ideal team should consist of members from all the required departments. This would also involve allocating resources to the team members.

• Once the process of implementation starts there should be provision for the senior management to intervene and review and evaluate the progress of the project.

• Educating the employees about the solution is a must. And detailed information must be given to them on why the system is being set up, what will the system do, and how it will make a difference to the overall business.

• While education is just to familiarize the workers with the new e-business solution the target of training is to make them capable of using the system. There should be equal emphasis on both these learning aspects. The training program should start with identification of a team who need to be trained for the use of the solution. Training objectives must be laid down along with the evaluation criteria. Then carry out the training program and periodically evaluate the progress of the trainees.

• With the training done, it is time for the implementation and this must be carried out in stages as was planned in the planning phase. The progress should be reviewed by the senior management at the end of each stage.

• At the end of the implementation process a post implementation meeting is a must, which must include all people involved with implementation process.

When implementing an e-business solution it may do the business good if a consultant on the subject is hired to guide you through the entire process.