In early stages, many organizations started to use the internet in more or less ad hoc and experimental ways. After this first stage of learning and experimentation there often arises a need for more systematic approaches to identify, order, and assess e-business options. This paper addresses this need and presents a framework as well as a tool supporting this framework, helping management to generate and order e-business options for their organization. The framework consists of two parts. The first part covers the identification of the dimensions of e-business options. Six dimensions are identified: external stakeholders groups, stakeholder statuses, channel strategies, communication modes, products/service groups, and product/service statuses. Users of this framework can apply these dimensions given the specific characteristics of the organization at hand. Subsequently, these dimensions are combined, generating, in many cases, a multitude of potential e-business options. The second part of the framework supports the process of ordering this large set of generated potential e-business options given certain criteria. This can be accomplished by ordering the dimensions as well as the elements along each distinguished dimension. Some of these elements are company-independent, while others are company-dependent. The framework is illustrated by a case study as a running example. We also offer a design of a tool supporting our framework. The framework focuses on e-business options between an organization and its current or new external stakeholders: possible internal e-business applications are excluded in this paper. The framework can be used as a tool for practitioners, such as consultants or managers, to generate e-business options for a company. They can use it -for example- in workshops to support idea-generation with respect to e-business planning in a creative and structured way. The framework also contributes to theory by providing a method that systematically offers new possibilities for using the internet. After the identification and the ordering of e-business options, the generated and ordered options have to be assessed and selected; this paper however, only focuses on the generating and ordering process.
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