Comments on E-Business and Enterprise 2.0

It is important to understand the differences between e-commerce and e-business, where e-commerce is basically a front end of e-business, which does most of the operations that a business should do (but in a more advanced way).

Personally, I am against the use of the term e-business which is rapidly loosing its meaning, that was originally important in order to state the new ways. Now it starts sounding like using “t-business” for the use of telephones in business operations... In my course Technology Enhanced Business (TEB), which I think is a more modern term (as well as on a number conference presentations), I am showing the technologies and methods that should be used in ALL businesses, in most of their processes and subsystems. Unfortunately, there are plenty of businesses that learned too much from business schools teaching old stuff and are trying to implement and maintain old methods. These should die out in modern economic situation.

Enterprise 2.0 has the same part as the description of an e-business would have PLUS an important aspect that goes beyond sharing and employee communications. The growing importance is seen in the ability of Enterprise 2.0 to convert consumers into "prosumers" as producers-consumers by allowing them to participate in the organizational operations; by somewhat (carefully, though) opening the closed walls of modern organizations to buyers, suppliers, and other EXTERNAL collaborators, stakeholders, and just consumers. This allows for faster and more tailored adaptation to the rapidly changing situations well as using extra resources that are not "on the payroll" or have to be managed by dedicated managers within special departments. This aspect might be also interesting for the W3P2 research.