Kirk Loweryis vice president, e-business strategic services, Oracle Corp.

E-business: The next Internet revolution

When I begin to work with a company, I ask what their e-business strategy is. I tend to find a lot of people telling me about web sites. E-business isn’t about web sites. E-business is about how you grow revenues.

How do you develop tighter relationships with your customers? How do you drive time and cost out of your supply chain? How do you realize operational efficiencies that you can drive to the bottom line? Those are the kinds of things you should be thinking about in terms of measuring your e-business strategies. There are three key issues to consider when building an e-business strategy.

DIFFERENTIATION. If you go out to the Internet today, companies are pretty much doing the same thing that their competitors are doing. E-business forces you to think about your business from the outside in. Look at your business through the eyes of your customers, through the eyes of your business partners, and through the eyes of your suppliers. Focus on value. If you don’t focus on the value added services, you’re going to end up with “me too” web sites and “me too” e-business solutions that don’t differentiate you in the marketplace.

In traditional value chains, relationships are pretty well defined. E-business is an opportunity to fundamentally change relationships in the value chain. The importance of this is that once an organization establishes a relationship with the customer, everyone else in the value chain must go through that relationship provider to get to the customer.

Another critical factor is to think about buying activities, not about products. This is the notion of remediation—i.e. reinventing the way products and services are marketed to customers. Are there complex buying activities that your customers are engaged in today? You might be playing a small role in that whole buying process, but is there an opportunity to remediate and capture the relationship with your customer.

SPEED. Speed is absolutely critical. If there is one lesson that we’ve learned in the world of e-business, it’s that time to market is critical. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems who’s getting wide acclaim for his vision of what e-business means to his company, states that in the world of e-business the big will not beat the small. The fast will beat the slow.

E-business isn’t like implementing an ERP application, where you implement it once and you’re done. E-business is a continuous process, continuously getting market feedback, and continuously delivering new value added services to customers.

There is a new business planning process emerging around e-business, and it challenges some of the traditional ways we do business planning. It is built for speed. To be successful in e-business you need to be thinking about quarterly (120-day) implementation cycles. There are three steps to this process—defining the business concept that you’re going to implement, deploying that to the marketplace, and then getting customer feedback and measuring performance to funnel back into the business concept process.

FLEXIBILITY. Flexible architectures based on Internet standards are the only way that you’re going to be able to meet the demands of time to market. Fundamentally, what the Internet is to us is a set of standards for how we integrate applications and data on a network. We’ve never had that before.

What that enables us to do is achieve a greater level of connectivity with our customers and our suppliers than ever before. As you begin to architect for your e-business solutions, begin with one notion in mind: that your stake in the sand is investing in Internet standards, and that becomes your Internet platform to build on. You’ll find that you probably have a layer in your architecture that I like to call the “Internet business object”—a published electronic interface into your company so that your customers and suppliers know how they’re going to do business with you electronically. Then there’s content services. As you think about value added services, you’ll be dealing with different kinds of content that require more and more different kinds of media.

Finally, integration will become your number one issue in e-business, including integrating the business processes and integrating the supporting technology. Your Internet platform needs to be able to facilitate the integration that you’re going to have into e-markets, into some of your business partners, and into some of your customers. It is the Internet standard that will give you the ability to achieve that integration.