INTRODUCTION

As has been said, e-business is a program and not a one-time project. As such, you want your organization approach for e-business to apply to both the short-term and long-term transformation into e-business. E-business involves the business more than it does IT. E-business has business, cultural, and political goals as well as IT goals. These statements impact how you will organize your approach to e-business implementation. At the heart of your approach is the support of the objectives in the next section.

If you organize the e-business effort along traditional lines, here are some of the potential impacts.

• A limited number of people will be involved in e-business implementation. There will be reduced commitment because the involvement is less. People will feel detached from the work.

• The focus of the implementation will tend to be exclusively on e-business. This sounds OK, but it really is not. The implementation team will miss many short-term opportunities for improvement that can lead to e-business. Management may have high expectations and want fast results. By devoting attention only to the end goal, there are likely to be few rapid results. The effort is more likely to be cancelled. Management is more likely to interfere with the implementation.

• The e-business work will probably be done in a more sequential manner. This will take longer. You need a parallel approach.

• E-business may be treated as an IT project. This has been cited in many survey of managers as a major cause for problems and failure.