From eTransformation to eCollaboration : issues and solutions

Since year 2000 Advance enterprise Information Management Systems Research Group (AeIMS) has been studying how Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can make use of advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to become globally competitive by making the business processes efficient and effective. Our test bed has been over 72,000 business organisations in the Western Sydney region of Australia. We learned early in our study that eTransformation cannot be done as an one off project, but it is an iterative process. Based on this finding we developed an eTransformation Roadmap and a methodology that can be used to iteratively transform the organisations. When testing this methodology through a series of action research cycles we learned that to get optimum benefit not only we need to change the business processes, but also the skills of people, management style, and the need to introduce new policies and procedures to manage the new ICT systems. We have also observed that these changes result in a major change in the organisation culture. Thus we extended the eTransformation methodology to provide a holistic approach to eTransformation, now known as 7 Es in eTransformation. The organisations that adopted this holistic approach were able to introduce new business models. eCollaboration was a major aspect of these new business models. The existing software development methods that require the system requirements to be fully specified at the start of a software development project were found not suitable to support the iterative eTransformation approach. As eTransformation happens in an iterative manner the system requirements also evolves in an iterative manner. Also once an application is developed it needs to evolve with changing business needs. To address these issues we adopted CBEADS; Component Based E Application Development System to develop software applications to support re-engineered business processes. Overall our research studies have shown that the eTransformation happening among SMEs as a r esult of advances in ICT requires significant changes to business processes, business models, people skills, management styles, ICT systems and organisational culture. We need to take a holistic view to get optimum benefit of eTransformation. It is now necessary to further develop models, methodologies and technologies to support this eTransformation process.