Three Technologies Every Business Should Explore
Rosemarie A. Fisher, CPA
Summer 1999 - NJCPA Newsletter

How do technological changes affect the way people work and businesses operate? This is the question facing every CPA, CFO, shareholder and business owner. How you answer that question depends on how well you apply new developments in technology to your business. With so many rapidly developing technologies hitting the marketplace, how do you pick what's right for your business? Three technologies that are "must looks" for every business are: E-commerce, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Virtual Private Networks.

E-Commerce

Consumers are more educated and demanding today. Whether it's a family shopping for a new car or a Fortune 500 company shopping for office supplies or employees, today's customers want information and service and they want it now, in real time, with no waiting. E-commerce allows buyers and sellers to do business 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere in the world.

Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA, predicts that 65 percent of companies with 5,000 or more employees will have some sort of e-commerce functionality on their website by the end of this year. At the start of this year, only 20 percent of those companies had e-commerce functions, but Forrester predicts that number will grow to 92 percent by 2002.

Should your business have a website? What should it offer? How should it be advertised? Who will use it? The answers to these questions vary from business to business and from industry to industry. To answer these questions, you can hire a website development consultant or do your own research. There also are many resources available on the Internet to "walk you" through the issues. Some interesting sites on e-commerce and website developement are:

• Electronic Commerce Resources Center, www.becrc.org, which functions as a clearinghouse and jump station for electronic commerce information;
• Top 200, www.netb2b.com, which features business-to-business marketing websites.

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