May 2000
17 pages

Historically, some companies have been successful with e-business initiatives because they were first to market, had compelling offerings and were extremely lucky. Others have failed due to equally mysterious combinations of bad luck and circumstances.

However, the window has closed on this chapter of e-business history. Any company that expects to succeed today will have to do so in a determined manner, marshaling the resources of its entire organization toward a unified vision of the future, marked by a balance of "e" and business.

A team of motivated stakeholders, led by an executive-level champion and guided by an objective facilitator, must recast an organization’s operational model to optimize it with new forces and capabilities.

Departmental barriers dissolve, market opportunities appear and disappear, and traditional thought patterns are shattered as organizations prepare to think, act and recast themselves as participants in the information age, capable of running at Web speed.

Roadblocks along the way include decentralized/duplicated efforts, too much or too little IT involvement, lack of clear accountability, failure to nurture the massive amount of requisite organizational change and succumbing to the one-size-fits-all mentality.

Although history is a valuable mentor, every organization is unique, and must strike the balance of learning from the past, while maintaining a unique organizational identity and custom-fit plan for the future.

With a recast business outlook and awareness of its organizational identity, executive-level champions and e-business teams must educate themselves on a number of topics, including the changes in their industries and markets, and Internet usage within and outside of their industries.

Factors, such as talent, process, organization, technology and measurement, combine and recombine as options are weighed and evaluated. When and how the organization might impose or suffer channel conflict is directly related to some e-business strategies.

Outsourcing e-business planning as a way of escaping its headaches may at first appear attractive, but it is analogous to handing the reins of the company over to perfect strangers.

In a recent presentation, Antonio Franco, Giga’s managing director of ePractices Strategy Planning, noted that from a style standpoint, the term "eBusiness" is properly capitalized — the "B" is capitalized because it is the most important part of the term, and the "e" is lower cased because it is the lesser of the two. Unless the outsourcers know more about the organization’s business than the executive-level champion and e-business team does, where is the justification to outsource?

However, external resources can and should play an enabling role in many ways.

External resources can:

1. Play the role of an apolitical facilitator among team members. Even with the best of intentions, internal politics have derailed more than a few initiatives.

2. Encourage candor that may not be afforded to an internal member.

3. Provide a base education for team members.

4. Offer practices and perspectives from other industries that parallel or compliment an organization’s circumstances.

5. Act as a sounding board for members, and an independent expert for senior executives outside the team.

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