Exchanges play a central role in business thinking and strategy development for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Business attitudes toward exchanges, however, have been shifting and remain ambivalent.
Three years or so ago, entrepreneurs and businesses first became interested in public exchanges as an attractive way to connect companies with their suppliers or business customers. Dozens of independent public exchanges were launched - and thousands proposed - to capture this business interest.
Two years ago, many large companies became nervous about the concept of such central, industrywide venues operating under the ownership of a new independent company. Their response was to create public industry-specific exchanges owned by consortia of companies in that industry.
Then, a year ago, businesses started to get concerned that public exchanges might somehow interfere with the relationships between businesses and their customers - that they will eliminate competitive advantages the businesses enjoy in their supply chain, or will never become reliable or secure enough to provide a sound foundation for valuable partner relationships.
As a result, many companies have created private exchanges that they operate either individually or with a handful of partners to facilitate online interactions with suppliers and/or customers. Still, all three of types of exchanges coexist uneasily and compete with one another for corporate mindshare.
With these forces pushing and pulling on exchanges, the perspective of how businesses regard exchanges is confused. To clarify this picture, in the summer of 2001 Booz Allen Hamilton and Giga Information Group jointly conducted a survey of leading companies on their experiences with and expectations for exchanges.
The bottom line of these survey results is that most companies are still caught between hope of future benefits and disappointment with the performance to date. Indeed, an overwhelming majority of the respondents believe exchanges so far have not met or only partially met their needs. There was also a wide disconnect between the benefits companies expect from exchanges and the services currently offered. Still, companies acknowledged that not only will exchanges have to mature, but companies will also have to change their organizations and reevaluate current processes/behaviors to truly benefit from the services exchanges offer.
The Giga/Booz Allen Hamilton survey shows that, in spite of the challenges, companies expect to conduct the bulk of their direct materials and indirect materials spending through exchanges within three years. Private exchanges, consortia public exchanges and independent public exchanges largely will divide the transaction flow. The same companies also expect to use exchanges for collaborative supply chain management, for collaborative product development and for customer relationship management (CRM).
Creating a portfolio of exchanges - as opposed to finding or building one exchange that meets all needs - appears to be the best strategic choice to satisfy each particular business demand. The technology development that could most impact the use of exchanges is widespread adoption of new communications technologies, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML).
Die vollständige Studie ist bei der Giga Group erhältlich.