e-Business

The term 'e-business' covers both e-commerce (buying and selling online) and the restructuring of business processes to make the best use of digital technologies. It will profoundly affect all aspects of the European economy and the way people will work in the 21st Century, offering opportunities and posing challenges to companies and consumers across Europe.

eEurope 2005 e-Business Actions in Brief
Policy and information actions in the field of law
Interoperability and standards
Human resources
Awareness and support actions

Europe's Single Market was created by eliminating barriers for companies wanting to do business across the EU, providing a much larger 'home market', enabling an increasingly competitive, globalised economy.One barrier that European Single Market legislation could not eliminate, however, was that of distance. e-Business helps eliminate this barrier, allowing all companies to trade worldwide from a single website.
An 'eCommerce enabled' Single Market could, therefore, provide European firms with a critical boost to their competitiveness. This is particularly the case for Europe's Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), which normally find it difficult to trade beyond their region or country, and can also face difficulties adopting new technologies.
A number of other obstacles stand in the way of e-Business fulfilling its promise, such as ensuring consumers' trust and confidence in trading on-line, ensuring users' privacy and consumer rights, interoperability issues and more.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) allow new forms of partnership between companies, suppliers and consumers, improving the way they work and the products and services they offer. This will require both new technologies and new sets of skills throughout the workforce.

eEurope 2005 e-Business Actions in Brief:

Europe has already made significant progress in all of the above areas, from the eCommerce Communication in 1997 to the creation of the future .eu domain in 2003 and the ongoing support to research, development and SMEs.
To reach the eEurope target of 'a dynamic e-Business environment by 2005', the Commission is pushing forward on a number of fronts:

Policy and Information Actions in the Field of Law:

Reviewing relevant European legislation preventing e-Business uptake, with a major e-business summit planned for February 2004 involving high-level business representatives;
Improving Trust and Confidence in e-Business through establishing a European on-line dispute resolution mechanism, information systems on legal issues, trustmark requirements, and more;

Interoperability and Standards:

Supporting the development of interoperable business solutions for transactions, security, signatures, procurements and mobile payments;

Human Resources:

Analysing "eSkills" supply and demand in Europe, and creating Europe-wide e-Skills definitions;

Awareness and Support Actions:

Establishing an e-Business support network to strengthen and coordinate SME e-Business support actions;
Raising awareness on the real benefits obtained by European SMEs by implementing advanced e-Business solutions in the context of the IST programme with showcases interchange and organisation of the e-Challenges annual conference;
Funding the e-Business Watch Function to provide a wealth of information on the impact and uptake of e-Business at sectoral level across the EU.
For further information on e-Business, see here.