Town of Cochrane Strategic Plan – Final Report October 2014
Table 1: E-Business Integration
Direction
Vertical
Trait
•
Lateral
•
Horizontal
•
Downward
•
Electronic network facilitates relationship between business’ web site and
back-end systems
Electronic network integrates a business and its customers, partners,
suppliers, or other stakeholders vital to a given operation
Integration of systems: E-commerce, enterprise resource planning,
customer relationship management, knowledge management, supplychain management
Intended to integrate new technologies within the firm
From the above table, it is evident that E-business encompasses a vast array of potential operations.
The sophistication of integration will largely depend upon the size of the firm and relative need for
the creation of new, innovative solutions.
2.1.2 E-Commerce
Easier to implement than most other E-business strategies, E-commerce refers to “outward-facing
processes” with the intent of facilitating commerce-related activities. This includes items like online
order processing, direct electronic transactions, and a multitude of potential electronic marketing
strategies. SMEs can benefit by a simpler, less costly integration of such processes. For example, the
implementation of web-enabled customer payments via an existing transaction system (e.g. PayPal)
would stand to open the firm to new markets and increase productivity, while remaining relatively
non-invasive to that business’ operations.
Given that SME resources can be limited in terms of capital availability, human resources, and ICT
knowledge bases, firm capacity to invest in many E-business strategies is often circumscribed. For
this reason, E-commerce strategies are in many cases considered as a minimum foray into E-business
operations.
2.2 E-Business and Community Economic Development
In addition to providing increased productivity and enhanced individual business capacity, a
significant factor to consider when weighing the relevance of E-business activity is the impact such
activity has on local economies overall. This is true when examined in the context of small
communities with limited resources, which are often unable to attract large scale investment typical
of traditional economic development. Traditional models tend to favour large, well-known
communities that have at their disposal a relatively deep wealth of capital resources.
It is true that traditional models of economic development work well (for a time) in boom economies
characterized by a small but dominant number of industries (automotive, forestry, etc.), but because
of the inherently unsustainable structure of such an economy, they are ultimately fated to deal with
the challenge of diversifying the local economy. It is here that the concept of community economic
development (CED) is fundamental to local sustainability, and with it E-business as a vehicle toward
realizing that end.
When contrasted with traditional economic development, CED is seen to be community-based,
conducted on a small scale, is process-oriented, sustainable, and technology-driven. Importantly,
technology is used as a means for CED to enhance and strengthen the overall process of economic
development, empower community actors, and facilitate the community’s access to external
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