3. Problem Definition

The problems and respective impact which GE was facing were:

Management Problems:
• Higher costs on production, distribution, agency[1] and transaction. Dot-com enterprises with high usage of technology in their process, made GE's costs not more competitive[2].
• GE was running on an old economy business. The company was not ready for changes of the business that were near it and could be running slower.
• Because of the dot com bubble, GE was almost obligated to transform into a digital firm. With the raising of new digital firms, more efficient and with lower costs[3], GE's products could be substituted.

Organization Problems:
• Business processes were not as efficient as the IT based ones. As a consequence, its products had higher prices. This could lower consumer's value or turn into a loss of market share in favor of competitors.
• Large vertical organization structure. Thus, total cost of human resources, such as managers and employees, was higher than digital firms[4].
• Distribution of employees was not optimal in order to maximize the use of an information system. This disabled a potential costs reduction[4].
• Extensive time to achieve maximum profit with an IS. Because of its big size, to maximize the use of the IS, a redefinition of all the processes and training of employees was vital after the deployment of the IS.
Technology Problems:
• Inefficient customer service due to the overload of incoming calls which could not be handled by the few engineers in charge.
• Lack of an IT infrastructure in support of the enterprise activities. Weak exploring of available technologies that could reduce costs and create more valuable products.

4. Solution Proposal

The GE initiative helps identifying and facing business’ challenges by analysing the value chain. The underlying process consisted in the uncovering, for each