How does the Internet influence operational effectiveness?

Dear Mohammad

your comment is prefect and clear enough which is difficult to find other points for this question. however internet can help one's business to effectively operate its activities by:

1- improve and update its knowledge base

2- participate in professional socieities and forums

3- using online services where they have comparative advantage over the onsite services.

One of my own speeches says: internet is the most important invention overall the whole history of human being.

Any operational activity can make use of the internet applications in order to enhance its efficiency apparently. The examples are many and cannot be listed all here, but we can put some examples:

1. Commercial connections in order to have the proper clients and market studies. This is related to the business development, sales, marketing and trends.

2. Supply chain connections and developments.

3. New techniques and technologies.

4. New quality systems and techniques.

5. Piece monitoring systems.

6. Remote maintenance.

In banking cheque operations in Bank clearing in automated banking, reduces cost, real time funding and confirmation of payment instantly (Unlike cheques realized as effects) with no cheque retuns or stopped payment by drawer. Internet is a secured platform, where banks have the opertunity to avoid Operation Risk

The Internet is arguably the most powerful tool available for enhancing operational effectiveness. By easing and speeding the exchange of real-time information, it enables improvements throughout the entire value chain, across almost every company and industry. And because it is an open platform with common standards, companies can often tap into its benefits with much less investment than was required to capitalize on past generations of information technology.

But simply improving operational effectiveness does not provide a competitive advantage. Companies only gain competitive advantages if they are able to achieve and sustain higher levels of operational effectiveness than competitors. That is an exceedingly difficult proposition even in the best circumstances. Once a company establishes a new best practice, its rivals tend to copy it quickly. Best practice competition eventually leads to competitive convergence, with may companies doing the same things in the same ways. Customers end up making decisions based on price, undermining industry profitability.

The nature of Internet applications makes it more difficult to sustain operational advantages than ever. In previous generations of information technology, application development was often complex, arduous, time consuming, and hugely expensive. These traits made it harder to gain an IT advantage, but they also made it difficult for competitors to imitate information systems. The openness of the Internet, combined with advances in software architecture, development tools, and modularity, makes it easier for companies to design and implement applications. As the sixed costs of developing systems decline, the barriers to imitation fall as well.

Today, nearly every company is developing similar types of Internet applications, often drawing on generic packages offered by third party developers. The resulting improvements in operational effectiveness will be broadly shared, as companies converge on the same applications with the same benefits. Very rarely will individual companies be able to gain durable advantages from the deployment of "best-of-breed" applications.