E-Business 2.0
What do we actually know about e-business? Does having a corporate website make you an e-business? What about running an online store? Search any major engine and you’ll find plenty about e-business centers, but surprisingly little about e-business itself. Most web developers still default to the same familiar set of deliverables: a brochure site, a product catalog, an online shop. The question is whether that’s really sufficient to build something that works.
Mapping the e-business landscape
Before asking what e-business needs, it helps to understand who it serves. The standard classification covers five relationships:
- B2C (business to consumer)
- B2E (business to employee, internal)
- B2B (business to business)
- B2A / B2G (business to administration or government)
- C2C (consumer to consumer)
There’s also a theoretical C2A category covering consumer-to-government transactions, though it rarely comes up in practice.
Beyond audience, e-business divides into three functional layers: e-commerce, corporate communications, and internal business systems.
E-commerce is the most visible layer. It covers online stores, logistics management, online marketing, and similar. For B2C, three basic models apply: advertising-based, community-based, and subscription/reward-based. International standards like UN/EDIFACT are increasingly embedded here, enabling product traceability, catalog normalization, and database synchronization across partners.
Corporate communications rely on voice telephony, voicemail, email, web conferencing, and content-driven web applications to keep internal and external stakeholders connected.
Internal business systems are built around applications like CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), EDM (electronic document management), and HRM (human resource management). Knowledge management systems and e-learning platforms are becoming standard additions to this stack.
A company with one or two standalone web solutions, disconnected from its core information systems, can’t really claim to have a functional e-business. For mid-size to large organizations, the only path to real impact is deploying a unified, web-based corporate information system.
The Internet as a platform
This is where Web 2.0 becomes relevant. Tim O’Reilly’s framing shifted how people think about the Internet: not as a collection of websites, but as a platform. A global operating system, with web applications as its programs, all accessed through a browser under consistent rules. The underlying hardware or its physical location stops mattering.
Applied to e-business, this means a company’s information space should also function as a platform. A user working in a web-based corporate system should have the same access whether they’re at headquarters, a remote office, or on a plane. The only requirements: a browser and an internet connection.
That might sound idealistic, but the spread of SOA (service-oriented architecture) is making it concrete. A growing number of companies now specialize in web integration, building bridges between web applications and the business software running on internal networks. Legacy local-network applications become, effectively, part of the Internet platform.
Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0-driven trends have reshaped corporate collaboration deeply enough to earn their own label: Enterprise 2.0. The core idea is the user community, which became the dominant design principle in web products around this time. It draws directly from two Web 2.0 concepts: the architecture of participation (systems designed to improve as more people use them) and user data ownership within the application.
Put it all together, add a generous layer of RIA (Rich Internet Applications), and you have the ingredients for a genuinely effective, next-generation e-business.