culture.gov.au
Connecting you with Australian culture online
Developing an ebusiness plan
Ebusiness takes the use of your website to a new level. It enables you to conduct a wide range of activities online, with a resulting improvement in the speed and efficiency of business transactions. Day-to-day business activities that can be improved by using the internet include marketing and promotion, banking, communication with staff, members and other organisations including government departments, staff training, stock and inventory control and research.
In addition, you will be able to increase revenue by conducting your buying and selling activities via the internet - the world of ecommerce.
Moving into the world of ebusiness demands careful planning. A well-developed ebusiness plan will enable you to identify the specifics of your operation. It will specify the type and level of ebusiness that your organisation wishes to engage in. It will address the broad concept for the website - its purpose, its nature and the content you wish to present. It will also allocate people, time and money to the project, and set targets for the completion of its many elements.
Ebusiness activities will affect all aspects of your organisation and all its members, so the plan should be developed by a team, comprising representatives from all sections - management, accounts, publicity and general staff, including volunteers, as well as any technical staff you have available. You may need to consider using the services of a web consultant to assist you with the technical aspects of ebusiness features.
Together you should think carefully about the ebusiness elements that are appropriate for your organisation, how you want them to be handled and who is going to be responsible for planning, implementing and maintaining each of them.
What to do
In order to move into ebusiness effectively you need to understand the issues involved in planning and implementation. You need to consider what your ebusiness plan should contain, what the opportunities and challenges might be, what the various levels of ebusiness are and how to assess the one that bests suits your organisation.
A detailed explanation about the planning process can be found in the Planning section of the NOIE ebusinessguide. Including:
- How to plan
- Researching the opportunities
- Key planning issues to consider
- What level of ebusiness is right for you?
- Writing your ebusiness plan
The Culture and Recreation Portal (CARP)
The CARP (this guide is a sub-set of CARP) contains 10 Internet Development Guides. The relevant one here that deals with the business plan is Guide 4. Is the internet for my business?
E-start online tutorial
The small business development corporation of Western Australia has produced an online tutorial (with audio) explaining ecommerce and how to get started. It provides a very useful way of understanding the main planning issues. To find out more try the ecommerce tutorial.
__________________________________________
go on to the next section Membership management systems
go back to the previous section Getting started
return to the eBusiness Guide home
If you can see this message, you are probably not seeing this site in the way it was designed. This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS2) to control the way in which elements are displayed on the page.
You will still be able to access everything in this site, but we do recommend you upgrade your browser to a more recent, standards compliant, browser.