• Will it lower my cost of doing business with customers?
• Will it reduce my response time as an organization?
• Will it improve my relationship with my trading partners?
• Will it result in higher customer retention?
• Will it improve relationships with my customers?
• Will it create new ways of getting to market?
• Will it lead to new revenue streams and market expansion?
• Will it reinvent the way that business is done in the industry?

Impact can be defined, and subsequently measured, in many different ways. In the final analysis, however, successful e-business initiatives will always result in one or more of four possible sets of outcomes:

1. Cost reduction
2. Revenue expansion
3. Time reduction
4. Relationship enhancement

Of these outcomes, cost reduction ranks as the least strategic. Increasing revenue, saving time, and improving relationships with customers, trading partners, and employees are more strategic, but also a great deal more difficult to achieve. Note that cost reduction and time saving are efficiency plays, impacting the bottom line. On the other hand, relationship improvement and revenue expansion, in particular, are the outcomes of top-line initiatives that can lead to the reinvention of an entire industry, handing out new rules to every last player in the game. It is an accomplishment of which few established companies can boast--although spin-offs, given their relative lack of baggage, have occasionally captured the spirit of the entrepreneurial startup, on rare occasions even acting as a catalyst for industrywide transformation.


What E-Business Is Not


"I don't know who discovered water," Marshall McLuhan, the media critic, once remarked, "but I know it wasn't a fish." That said, if you remove a fish from water, it very quickly gains a deep appreciation for what water is and what water does.

Because fish--and people, too--generally have trouble perceiving the objective details of an environment in which they have become so completely immersed, much can be gained by taking a step back from the incessant noise of "e-business this" and "e-business that" that bombards us each day in the media. Like the fish that lives in water all its life but can appreciate its importance only when it

is removed from the water, it pays to pause for a moment to consider what e-business is not. Therefore, taking a further cue from McLuhan, who defended his more provocative statements as "probes" that could awaken an audience from its hypnotic trance and jolt them into seeing their environment in a whole new light, the following "probes" are intended to counter some of the misguided assumptions that have inevitably sprung up around e-business transformation.

E-Business Is Not a Bolt-On to Your Business

Because e-business is an integral component of a business, it should be treated in such a way that it becomes centrally integrated and fused with the overall plumbing. The paradox is that the e-business organization should initially be separate from the rest of the organization. It should exist autonomously, incubated at a distance from mainstream operations in order to command a high degree of focus and attention. Longer term, however, to take advantage of the benefits of synergy and learning, and to avoid creating yet another information silo within the organization, there should be a clear integration plan. The e-business organization should be designed so that it becomes assimilated into the parent organization after a period of time and its areas of accountability transitioned into the main body of the corporate structure. One need only imagine a fruit tree that grows on its own in the beginning but which, at a certain point along its development path, gets carefully grafted onto the trunk of the mother tree. Over time, as the tissues fuse, it then becomes that tree. The graft needs to be nurtured separately from the tree, but it cannot be kept apart too long, or else it begins to develop its own roots and its own identity.

Remember that e-business is a crutch, not a leg. It is useful to separate it from the lines of business when you are learning to walk, but eventually it needs to become an integral part of the business. This assertion is validated by our conversations with e-business leaders at a host of best-practice firms. The more progress they make in their e-business initiatives, the harder it becomes for them to define what the e-business organization looks like. Why? Because the lines of business take charge of those initiatives, eliminating the need to isolate the initiatives in a separate organization.


Source: The Seven Stps to Nirvana