Leveraging Technology
Move swiftly and deliberately – When you move to e-business, it pays to move quickly and completely. In many industries, business cycles already reflect e-business efficiencies and speed. Waiting for internet technology to “mature” will probably mean ceding advantages to bolder competitors.
Fully integrate the technology – It pays to integrate e-business with your core operations from the start. This approach leverages business-proven systems you already have and ensures that customer service and accounting are consistent across all sales channels.
Ensure systems are dependable – Scalability, availability and security are not optional. Extending business-critical applications to the Web doesn’t make them any less critical. In a system that is only available 95% of the time, 5% of sales transactions are lost.
Satisfy customer needs – Customer knowledge is everything on the Web. The company that knows its customers best and uses what it knows to serve them better has a huge advantage in this one-to-one environment where competitors are only a click away.
Focus on the big picture – The key to transforming any major process is to identify all of the sub-processes that are a part of it. This sounds obvious until you consider that most business processes span multiple operating environments and customers. It pays to focus on the whole – rather than at the systems designed to serve just pieces of the business.
Allow for future expansion – Plan to overbuild for traffic you don’t expect to get initially. Triple-digit growth is the norm in e-business and unpredictable 1,000% demand spikes are common. Early overcapacity is less expensive than starting again if your site crashes and customers move on.
Build in compatibility – A vital component of e-business is a way to manage the performance of all your systems, networks and applications – as a single enterprise.
Plan for change – An “ideal solution” that is platform centric or uses proprietary technology may not be as bankable in an e-business world as a more flexible standards-based solution.
© 2009 "Start Small, Grow Big" Barbara Mowat and Ted James, with the contribution of William Erichson on Chapter 6, "Financing A Growing Business". All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, amended, modified, edited, transmitted in any form, or translated in any way without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. www.ImpactCommunicationsLtd.com.
