Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1: The e-Infrastructure Challenge – Opportunities and Problems
This chapter serves as an introduction to the changes taking place that fall under the broad heading of e-business. It provides models to help the reader e-business maturity. It also describes what we call the ‘infrastructure perspective’ – a way of looking at and translating between infrastructure and organizational needs.

Chapter 2: Information Infrastructure for Business-to-Business
This chapter addresses the currently most important area of e-business activity – B2B. It encompasses e-procurement, supply chain integration, internet exchanges and Internet market places. It explains the principal opportunity areas, identifies the component building blocks that enable companies to exploit these opportunities and addresses the standards and integration issues.

Chapter 3: Information Infrastructure for Business-to-Consumer
This chapter addresses the business-to-consumer space (B2C). Although in less favour than previously, there is still a high level of actual and predicted activity, as many retail operations adopt a mixed clicks-and-mortar strategy. We look at the principal components of a B2C applications architecture.

Chapter 4: Information Infrastructure for Intra-firm e-Business
This chapter explores the infrastructural implications of intranets. A core component of e-business is the potential efficiency gains to be achieved through self-service internal business processes. Information and knowledge sharing is the other main area of benefit from intranets. This Chapter explores the infrastructural implications of intranets.

Chapter 5: Global Infrastructure for Global Business
This chapter explores the growing demand for firms to make a common offer to their customers and the role of web technology in enabling companies to meet such demand. It describes some of the trends in global e-business, draws attention to the implications of a company’s approach to global branding and considers the infrastructure issues from two viewpoints: the global corporate IT unit, and the country IT unit.

Chapter 6: Driving e-Business Infrastructure
This chapter confronts the leadership challenge. Most especially, it highlights the organizational rather than technological nature of infrastructure. It addresses the problem of how to organize for e-business and what implications this has for infrastructure management. It also addresses the problem of winning business support for IT infrastructure by: identifying the reasons the problem arises; proposing how to understand and position infrastructure in terms that business executives can understand; and making suggestions for ways to achieve a common understanding throughout your company.

Chapter 7: Technology Platform and Architecture
This chapter looks at the technology platform in terms of both the kinds of technology required and architecture appropriate to a situation. It recognizes that there is no definitive platform for every situation at any time and identifies principles for achieving a flexible platform.

Chapter 8: The Infrastructure Skills Challenge
This chapter addresses the skills management challenge. It discusses how companies are facing recruitment and retention problems and the solutions they are implementing.

Chapter 9: Planning, Foresight and Control
This chapter identifies key processes for managing e-business infrastructure. These include investment, project management and standards control. Companies’ approaches to technology foresight are discussed.

Chapter 10: Complementary Infrastructure
This chapter highlights some unusual components of infrastructure under the broad label of complementary infrastructure. Under this heading, we look at content and intellectual property on the one hand, and at physical complements such as distribution centres on the other.

Chapter 11: Sourcing IT and e-Business Infrastructure – Practices and Risk Management
This chapter summarizes our growing understanding of the reasons for success and disappointment in outsourcing IT. It discusses how best to use the IT/e-business outsourcing market. As outsourcing can be thought of as essentially concerning risk management, this Chapter indicates what the key risks are and how they can be mitigated.

Chapter 12: Sourcing IT and e-Business Infrastructure – Development Projects and Strategic Relationships
Chapter 12 focuses on when and how organizations can source work from the external market, and how far they need to build core capabilities in-house.

Chapter 13: Application Service Provision and Beyond: the New e-Infrastructure
This Chapter looks at the opportunities and challenges that ASP models and their further development present for building and running e-business infrastructure. In effect, it explores the idea that over time, ASPs could take over the infrastructure problem for their clients, but only if they are able to provide all the applications a company needs and its upgrade paths for the future.

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