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The results of this months research are available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. (To download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in, click here.)
- Is E-Business Finally Living Up To Its Hype?
- 42% of Companies Revenues Have Significantly Increased Due to E-Business
- 59% of Companies Report Significant Cost Savings Due to E-Business
- 60% of Cios Say Their Companies Closely Track the Value of Their E-Business Efforts
- 78% Say They Have Not Tapped the Full Competitive Advantage of E-Business
Since the mid-1990s, e-business has been the “next big thing.” But definitions of what e-business was and how it would benefit companies were as squishy as Jell-O. In Phase I, companies practiced “brochureware” by building a rudimentary corporate Web site; Phase II featured online transactions and order status. In Phase III, companies say they are beginning not only to tie their basic IT infrastructure into the Internet, but to move more and more of their core business functions to a Web-centric model. CIOs at companies of all sizes, markets and business models are deploying Web-based applications to do everything from increasing revenues and cutting costs to enhancing customer service and improving employee productivity. Of course, it hasnt been easy: The vast majority of the more than 500 CIOs we surveyed indicated that e-business has made information security a bigger challenge, increased overall IT complexity and forced companies to collaborate among departments and business units far more than had been the norm. But the promise of e-business appears on its way to being realized, as many CIOs report their companies have hiked sales and reduced costs thanks to their e-business initiatives, resulting in better competitive positions and enhanced shareholder value.
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How Can E
-business Provide a Competitive Advantage?”>
How Can E-business Provide a Competitive Advantage?”
When Michael Porter wrote Competitive Advantage in 1985, there was no commercial Internet. But today, if you do a Yahoo! search for the phrase “competitive advantage and the Internet,” youll turn up a list of more than 1.2 million entries.
Talk to senior IT strategists about how theyre defining (or, often, redefining) competitive advantage from their e-business initiatives, and you can probably boil it down to four words: Speed, cost, customers and process.
Speed: “In e-business, there are two currencies: money and time,” says Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Technology Strategy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. “Time is the biggest leverage point today when it comes to getting ahead and staying ahead of the competition, because getting to your cash more quickly allows you to make more money off the same margin.”
One CIO who had a front-row seat a few years ago in Cisco Systems Inc.s renowned e-business program is John Bruno, head of Ciscos global IT infrastructure organization and now SVP for business development and CIO at Symbol Technologies Inc. in Holtsville, N.Y. “At Cisco, time was currency,” he says. “We could waste nothing but time. We would have [aggressively embraced e-business] even if it had cost us more, because it allowed us to be faster than our competitors.”
“As CIOs, we need to support the business units in helping customers and partners get in and out quickly with what they need,” notes Mark Sklenar, senior vice president and CIO of Underwriters Laboratories Inc. in Northbrook, Ill. “Speed, speed, speed—its everything.”
Cost: When it comes to getting out in front of the competition, reducing costs at a time when consumers and businesses alike are increasingly sophisticated and demanding about prices is an essential ingredient in gaining competitive advantage. Says Berkeleys Chesbrough: “Today, the top priority of the CIO is to take cost out of the current business processes via e-business. That creates credibility for CIOs and smoothes the way for them to take the lead on projects that drive revenue and take market share.”
“In an industry like ours, its still about selling a lot of stuff at low margins,” says Guy Abramo, executive vice president and chief strategy and information officer of computer-product distributor Ingram Micro Inc., in Santa Ana, Calif. “You need to find cost-effective ways to serve the micro needs of your customers, and do so better than your competitors.”
Customers: Companies in all industries need to become more customer-centric, and most companies e-business initiatives put that at or near the top of their list of goals. Many senior IT execs are accomplishing that goal by letting their customers do more of the work. “Customer self-service is really on the top of every companys e-business wish list,” says Gary Marich, manager of applications development for paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams Co. in Cleveland. “More and more often, customers want to be able to walk into a store, go to a kiosk, place the order and have a guy walk out with their paint. Its nice to know the guy behind the counter is there if you need him, but if theres a way to use technology to get you in and out of the store faster with what you want, why not?”
Ingram Micros Abramo says an important element of keeping the company ahead of its competitors in an intensely competitive market segment like his is understanding what part of Ingrams value chain could actually be disaggregated and made available to customers.
“When you make available Web-based services to your customers, like order management or logistics, you completely transform your relationship from a buy/sell one to a service-based relationship,” Abramo says.
“Competitive advantage could really be defined as customer entanglement,” says U.L.s Sklenar.
Process: Does a companys business process define what kind of e-business architecture is deployed, or do e-business systems redefine how companies conduct their business processes?
“A lot of CIOs, particularly since many of them have come to their jobs from the e-business world, have built far more agile architectures to take advantage of e-business and integrate it much more closely into a companys core business processes,” says Ellen Kitzis, group vice president for Gartner Inc. “The smart CIOs are the ones who understand how to tightly link their e-business initiatives with their companies business processes to get ahead.”
“With e-business, youre trying to unlock process innovation,” Symbols Bruno points out. “Can we modify the business processes in order to better match the systems capabilities? If so, you can get more out of your existing infrastructure without having to reinvent the wheel.
“Otherwise,” Bruno adds, “its like putting lipstick on a pig. If all youre doing is putting Web-based GUIs on antiquated business processes, whats the point?”