The "E" Is For Everything: E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Learning in the Future of Higher Education - Reviews: looking before leaping on the `E' bandwagon - Review

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Nov-Dec, 2000 by Colleen Roach

The "E" Is For Everything: E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Learning in the Future of Higher Education Edited by Richard N. Katz and Diana G. Oblinger Jossey-Bass, 2000 (EDUCAUSE Leadership Strategies, No. 2)

In the preface to their book, the editors cite a Fortune columnist who recently wrote that the "e" in e-business will soon be irrelevant--and presumably dropped--because the only businesses to survive will be e-businesses. Although some people believe that such pronouncements are "hype," others feel that even if e-business is a bandwagon, institutions of every sort should get on board, and quickly.

The authors represented in this book are definitely in the latter category. The problem, as they see it, however, is that most university administrators either can't see the bandwagon coming or aren't spry enough to climb aboard.

Hence, one of the principal themes of this collection of articles is to lay out the compelling reasons why, as the first chapter puts it, e-commerce is "a matter of extraordinary importance." The marriage of academia and the business world is reflected in the two institutions that sponsored the book's publication. EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association, headquartered in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C., promotes technological innovation in universities through conferences and publications of this sort. PricewaterhouseCoopers is a major international consulting firm, whose clients include many Fortune 500 businesses as well as major universities. The authors represent a mixture of IT specialists from educational nonprofits, universities, and the business world.

Although in an early chapter the authors write that it is "not critical" to master the jargon of "e-business," they do help the reader along by giving some general definitions and specific examples of what certain terms mean. "E-business" is the overarching, generic term; basic examples would include a customer identifying goods or services, and choosing or ordering a product via the Internet. Although the term is usually reserved for the work of businesses large and small, an implicit assumption in this book--made particularly explicit in the last chapter by the PricewaterhouseCoopers consultants--is that "e-business" can also be applied to other institutions, namely colleges and universities.

The term "e-commerce" is a little more specific: According to the authors, it refers to the "marketing, sales, and payments for goods, services, and experiences using electronic means." The most profitable area of e-business is, at present, the B2B (business to business) sector of the market. Forrester Research, quoted by the authors, predicts that in 2003, this sector will account for $1.08 trillion, a 35-fold increase from 1998. The B2C sector of the market (business to consumer) is much less spectacular, as shown in the demise of dozens of dot.coms earlier this year.

The "e" term that is most often linked to higher education is "e-learning," also referred to in the book as "distance learning." The chapter dealing with this, the most salient aspect of electronic delivery systems on education, is very timely. According to a report released in early August by Market Data Retrieval, a Dun & Bradstreet educational company, the number of colleges offering online degrees doubled in just a year.

The report also noted that the boom in online courses is part of a larger general trend in universities toward increasing expenditures on computer technology. The authors of The "E" Is For Everything also note, however, another aspect of the increase in online diplomas: Universities do not have a monopoly in this area, as other institutions--including corporations and even publishing houses--are also offering online educational opportunities.

There is much that is good in this book, particularly for people who are wondering what e-commerce is all about and whether there really is a place for it in today's university. (Here, more information on e-commerce courses and diplomas being offered by universities might have been offered). The chapter calling for coherent policy-making is well worth reading, since piecemeal policy-making can have particularly disastrous effects in the area of IT. In addition to the larger issues, there are also some wonderful nuggets of information on e-commerce in general. For example, readers will learn why they are so often directed to Web sites by "help" lines. Analysts estimate that answering a telephone inquiry costs $25 to $30, compared with serving a customer on the Web, which costs just $2 to $3.

But, all in all, the book does not make a compelling case for higher education redesigning itself as "e-business." The problem is evident from the outset. In the second chapter, the author laments the results of a recent survey showing that "comparatively few institutions had e-commerce capacity as school opened in the fall of 1999." In addition to not providing their students with enough "access to content and other resources," universities are criticized for not using e-commerce to "improve various aspects of the enterprise-to-enterprise or supply-chain business activities that are common to organizations of similar size and complexity."