16.1 The scope of e-business consulting

The key aspect of e-business is its focus on digitization of business processes. The universal connectivity permitted by the growth of the Internet and a standardized way of communicating across different computing platforms is shifting the balance of importance from the physical world to the digital world. While in the past physical assets, such as production capacity, transport capacity and labour, were strategic assets, today information, digital network channels and knowledge are considered of higher value.

Figure 16.1 illustrates the types of e-commerce relationship between buyer and seller, according to whether the relationship is a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) interaction. The upper two quadrants are traditional business interactions; however, the lower two quadrants are worth some attention. The C2C quadrant is not new in that the second-hand goods pages in newspapers have long offered a channel for matching buyer and seller. What is different is the enormous reach and volume that trading sites, such as