Like this story?
Now you can license it
for your own publication.

This author is available
to write for your publication or website. Find out how.

Another Internet messiah wants to sell you their latest (proprietary) computer goodies in the guise of business consulting. To hear them talk, you'd swear the e-business revolution involves getting the latest whiz-bang technology and bam! You're an e-business. You can now do business online, empower customers, distributors, and your sales force, and bask in the self-actualization of your own personal nirvana.

Thankfully, some are not taken in by the marketing mystique. Most of us know that the promises of e-business, though truly revolutionary, lie not in proprietary hardware or software, but in a sound e-business plan that integrates your customers, company culture, existing processes, and value proposition.

The Culture Factor

Your company culture is simply one's total impression after an interaction with it. It's important to remember your culture is experienced not only by the outside world, but also by everyone within your company. Your culture is reflected in company values, politics, processes, conflictes, alliances, and shared objectives—even its physical environment. It finds expression in your corporate identity and voice. People who get paid to evaluate this sort of thing disagree on whether a culture is the expression of current reality within an organization, or the projected ideal toward which the organization aspires. For our purposes, let's use both definitions.

This is not to say that your marketing imagery and messages represent your organization's true culture. For all the good it accomplishes for your company, marketing's purpose is relatively narrow compared to your total business strategy, and it's not what you would call a true reflection of your culture. While marketing sells the sizzle, your e-business strategy must focus on the steak. Not just the end product of steak, but the so-called value chain—the process and players—and in the evolution that includes research, design, procurement, development, and processing before it becomes a final product or service. Don't be lulled into believing that the company your are is the company portrayed in your promotionals; your culture is the company you are, even when no one else is looking.

Understanding the e-Customer

The promotion and perception of e-business in the media strikes some people as mysterious, and others in terms so narrow, they don't realize how broadly the brush is painting.

Think about it: For years, we've gradually become customers in an interconnected, networked economy. Every week, I use a magnetic card to draw cash from a machine that's tied to my bank account. My bank account isn't actually in the machine, and it's not in my bank, either. In fact, my bank has ceased to exist as a physical place and has moved the transaction to a virtual space. Another example: When I purchase goods or services, I reach for my wallet, not for cash, but for that same magnetic card, which a vendor swipes through a machine. That machine employs a computer network to debit my checking account, capture the funds in the vendor's account, and notify the vendor that it has processed my purchase. But it goes beyond monetary transactions. I also send packages by overnight courier to clients or friends, and the service uses another network to track my package throughout its journey. Each of these is an example of e-business, or at least a component of it, often called e-commerce. One of the best things about being an e-customer is the convenience. A less obvious, but more powerful, benefit is control.

The first thing you'll have to do is examine your existing customer base. What kind of customers are they? Have they established behaviors online that you can observe and learn from? Can you define demonstrated patterns in their business relationships and consumer habits? What cultural peculiarities make them ideal e-business customers?

Beware the advice of mass-media advocates, those diehards of 20th Century big business who see the Internet and the e-business wave it has spawned as a mass-marketing vehicle, a way to manage customers at arm's length. They seek to mollify the public online as they did in the mass media age of television and radio, using carefully crafted messages and images of the corporation to "brand" their life experiences, thus creating "cradle to grave" customer relationships. This outlook fails to see that customers today face a myriad of choices and possess incredible power to make purchasing decisions. They make those decisions based on their own research, which they can now conduct with amazing efficiency using the Internet. The truth is, customers today can afford to be skeptical of messages that smack of mass marketing. You don't "handle" customers like that, you must respond to them; fail to respect them, and they'll just click over to someone who will.

Now, when I say "customers," I mean the people, work teams, departments who are now, or will soon be, served by your company as it morphs into an e-business. This is a significantly broader group than merely end consumers, so the discussion is not just about so-called business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing models. It's about addressing everyone involved in the business as customers. Customers have needs and preferences. Their needs may not be recognized, but they deserve some attention, especially if they turn out to be key customer groups that you will address in your e-business strategy.

All customers share certain characteristics which, though largely ignored in the mass-media methodology, must be taken into account when planning for e-business. They will all want to control their relationship with your company. Customers will expect that you work with them to understand their unique perspectives on that relationship. Their demand for useful information will often mean you must customize information to fit their particular applications. Finally, customers will expect the accessibility of your staff to answer their questions and address their preferences and custom orders. Consequently, your people must be well-informed and able to work beyond the cookie-cutter expectations so many companies maintain today.

Building Your Strategy Team

Okay, so your company is planning to build an e-business. This obviously involves a lot more than buying any given e-business "solution" hawked by famous name consultants and powered by big-budget dollars. Doing e-business on the new economical landscape requires more than the latest computer hardware and software. It requires methodical planning and preparation and involves serious organization, introspection, and soul-searching. It requires resolve—the guts to articulate the type of business you are, to choose the customers you want, and to decide how you're going to give them the value that earns their business. Let's face it, customers today have more power than ever. Their options are just a click or two away, and to reckon with this kind of power, you have to discard adversarial tactics and face customers on their own terms.

Whether you retain professional strategists or choose an in-house team, you must focus on selecting and defining the key customer groups you will pursue online. You will have to find out how your customers see your business processes and the truth about their experiences with you on the front lines.

Because customers also include workers within your company, you'll need to define their roles and responsibilities and how they work within and between departments or divisions. What are their work flows, behavior patterns, and expectations? How do their lifestyles interact with their work styles? By appreciating the importance of communications and learning about your customers, you will begin to see how you must adapt to be truly responsive to them. Good e-business strategists will help you understand these perspectives, and if they are brought in from outside your company, they may offer refreshing objectivity free of the political forces within your company which could otherwise slow down the momentum of the process.

Smart business people have long known that transactions are more than mere exchanges of money and goods. The new business environment of the Internet is no exception. Commerce happens at key moments in your customer relationships. Value is offered and exchanged between your company and your customers at these "touchpoints." Your strategy team should be representative of these touchpoint prelationships. Choose people who regularly encounter customers at key touchpoints. These may include customer service staff who answer phones, fulfill product sample requests, accept payments, help with product installation or operation, or check customer accounts. They may be marketing people who study customer behavior, examine demographic and econographic data, and evaluate programs to reach new customers while growing existing business relationships. Or they could be R&D professionals, constantly on the lookout for what customers really want or need, people who seem to always uncover new ways to connect with customers. The important thing is to involve such key touchpoint people in your strategic planning.

The Challenges of Development

Whether you outsource your e-business development or use an in-house team is another important decision. There are many things you can do to prepare for a smooth development cycle that makes the most of your corporate assets. Most companies realize early on that providing a constant flow of relevant, useful information on their site is a serious challenge. Many find it difficult even to launch the inaugural site with adequate content to cover the needs specified by their strategy. It's important to define at the beginning the deliverables expected of each member of the strategy team as it relates to providing content. If the strategic team is going to define the objectives of the e-business, they're going to have to define the sources of content (text, images, statistics) required to serve key customers.

Even the most articulate, ambitious e-business strategy will fall apart if the development approach is not equally compelling. While in strategic planning, you identified key customers and how you would serve them. Now you must develop and maintain a site map and other organizational schema that assign appropriate content and site features to defined customer groups. In my experience, this method works best when approached from a multidisciplinary style. Graphic design reminds us that context is as important as content. Architecting the interplay between messages and user functionality presents a delicate balance between form and function. Whether your e-business is developed in-house or contracted to outside specialists, you'll have to take the direction born out of strategy and maintaining its integrity of vision during development.

The Importance of Speed

Our chief strategist has a poster on his wall proclaiming in bold letters, "The End of Slow." It's become a mantra around the office expressing his resolution to develop and deliver strategic plans quickly in order to capitalize on clients' windows of opportunity. As the business principle holds, you have to be willing to take risks, and risks can't be taken gingerly. Today, in the midst of an economy that's moving faster than any before it, the risks are calculated in exactly the same way, only faster. Business people have to realize that the original idea of today is the commodity of tomorrow. No idea is immune to duplication by your competitors. Ideas don't matter if you don't execute them in time.

Getting to market first is important, but being prepared to compete is critical. In this sense, the importance of speed can be overstated. You have to build your strategy on the foundation of good information, timely intelligence, and competitive instinct. But once that strategy is articulated in your mind, you need to harness it using your team's collective resources in order to carry that energy forward into making your e-business a reality.

The Future of e-Business

Many believe e-business will continue to evolve as the technology improves and only when the gap is reduced between the Internet "haves" and "have-nots." While the digital divide is an interesting discussion in its own right, it is not the true force behind e-business. The values and philosophies of e-business—speedy response, customer empowerment, interdependence, and business integration at all levels—represent the true drivers. Only as we, the customers, continue to demand better service, quality experiences, and solid value, will we begin to realize the power we possess to influence change. Soon, every business will be a "dotcom." We should embrace the revolution not because of its technological inevitability, but because we believe that taking care of customers is still the best way to do business.