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Strategies & Market Trends : e-Commerce the Next 100 Months...... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cm who wrote (1565)	9/24/1998 10:22:00 PM
From: cm	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2882

Compaq Lecturing On The Topic of E-Commerce... Now, here's an interesting scenario. A Compaq executive lecturing coporate America on the importance of building your e or I-commerce strategy. Huh. I mean, Compaq does now have a limited e-commerce capability. But, I don't think they're quite the experts that, say, another company in the PC sector with $8 million in daily online sales is... Compaq exec: build I-commerce systems now By Matthew Nelson InfoWorld Electric Posted at 12:12 PM PT, Sep 24, 1998 LOS ANGELES -- If you haven't started building an Internet-commerce system for your business, you'd better get moving, because it's almost too late, said Patrick Smyth, vice president and general manager of electronic commerce at Compaq, in his keynote speech here at the Internet Commerce Exposition (ICE). During his speech, entitled Bridging Business and Technology, Smyth stressed that it is necessary for companies to not simply approach creating an I-commerce site from either the IT or business perspective but that both must be merged together to be successful. "It's incredibly important to integrate and start planning your business process with IT," Smyth said. "If you're coming at the world from an IT perspective, it will not work. If you come at it from a business perspective, that will not work -- you need to link the two. "This poses some pretty fundamental challenges to IT organizations that are fundamentally structured in a closed way," Smyth added. Smyth postulated the idea of a network becoming more and more the center of any business' core process. "The business model needs to change and will change as the network becomes the core of your business," Smyth said. "Imagine a world where the network is the center of business. The IT evolution that you are about to go through is quite profound." Smyth also presented several examples of I-commerce companies -- such as Amazon.com and Priceline.com -- that are rapidly appropriating standard business customers and streamlining their internal costs, as both a model as well as a threat. Smyth then outlined specific pieces that a successful commerce site needs as it is created and evolves. He listed the importance of planning financial connections, payment systems, authentication, security, back-end data connections, links to experienced business partners, and, most importantly, creating a good relationship with customers. "As your business begins to look like an electronic business, one of the most strategic elements you need to consider is how to build a one-to-one relationship with your customer," Smyth said. "Putting the human connection into this medium is going to make sites successful." In closing, Smyth referenced again the growing I-commerce companies and warned that if companies don't get moving, they will start losing more and more business to these new competitors. "The last bullet that says 'do it now' hopefully gets home a point -- you can't wait and see what's going to happen with this business," Smyth said. "There is an imperative. If you don't, then your competitor will and it's going to be much more difficult to do it later."