Prepare for e-business on demand.

WE all remember the days when checking one's bank account balance meant a
trip to the branch and when placing a phone call outdoors required
finding a telephone booth. Now we no longer have to worry about some
stores' business hours, the location of a phone booth or a bank branch. 
  We have come to expect and depend on services being available to us,
wherever and whenever we need them. 
  "E-business on demand" is the next phase of e-business, Companies and
organisations will move beyond integrating their various processes as
they will need to sense and respond to fluctuating market conditions in
real-time and adjust to doing business in these areas: 
  • Responsiveness: Adapt quickly to the dynamic and often
unpredictable changes in demand for a company's products or services,
availability of supplies, market trends, consumer behaviour and
competition developments;
  • Variability: Be flexible in terms of costs and processes. This
is the internal, organisational facet of responsiveness and the set of
practices and mechanisms that a business needs to deploy in order to be
responsive;
  • Focus: The ability to understand and sustain one's core
competencies and differences within the market - this is the leadership
facet of responsiveness; and,
  • Resiliency: Manage changes and threats in a reliable and
secure manner. Events ranging from force majuere or man-made catastrophes
to power spikes have become more and more part of what businesses have to
confront. This is the operational facet of responsiveness. 
  What kind of technological infrastructure does "e-business on demand"
require? In order to be successful, the on-demand environment will have
to be:
  • Integrated: Core processes - not merely computers - will have
to work seamlessly. 
  • Virtualised: Using the dormant capacity of servers and PCs
(notorious for their low percentage of actual CPU usage) will result in
virtually unlimited computing capacity, available to business processes -
this is the computing grid;
  • Open: All technologies will be able to work together. This is
the era of open standards and architectures: Linux, XML, Java and Web
services; and,
  • Autonomous: The complexity of this infrastructure will require
a new method of management and support, very much like how living
organisms self-manage their physiological functions. The infrastructure
components will have the ability to autonomously detect, fix and manage
problems in their own "body", with no human intervention, and without
affecting the functions that support business processes.
  So, there has never been a better time to go into computing. There is
no sign of any decrease in the demand for IT skills.
  Internet networking and communications remain a current boom area. 
  The best courses should include the basic science of computing. These
are skills that will never become outdated regardless of how the industry
changes.
  Contact Olympia College for course details in Information Technology or
Business Studies and other courses in Hotel Management, Secretarial
Studies, Accounting, pre-university matriculation programmes and English
at 03-20503638 (Kuala Lumpur), 03-7955 8868 (Petaling Jaya), 04-658 4868
(Penang), 07-2233868 (Johor Baru), 09-5177868 (Kuantan) or 05-243 3868
(Ipoh). 
 

 Reference: 

Prepare for e-business on demand. (2005, May 1). New Straits Times.