Planning for the Future

With respect to your future use of the Internet, your organisation is currently faced with two choices --

Continue with the Status Quo -- You can continue to maintain and add more to your current standard website, seeing it mainly as a vehicle for information delivery to anonymous visitors. If you have an Intranet, you can continue to maintain a high degree of separation between it and the infrastructure that supports customers and business partners. You can ignore the need for an integrated system infrastructure for supporting the customisation of your offerings and the personalisation of your interaction with customers. You can manage complexity by limiting your offerings and your degree of differentiation in the marketplace, and you can leave the support for the interaction with the various participants to traditionally-based system processes.

Gain Higher Business Leverage through a more Powerful Supporting Infrastructure -- Alternatively, by incrementally establishing a B-Web infrastructure, you can position your organisation to prosper in a fast moving business climate. You will be able to sharpen and strengthen your relationships with customers and business partners through the personalisation of interactions. You will enjoy the flexibility to customise your offerings to match market needs. Finally, you will gain the ability to continue to restructure your organisation to achieve new levels of efficiency, and to prosper in changing times.

Success is increasingly becoming dependent on your ability to be nimble, flexible, and able to anticipate. To maintain an edge against the competition, a flexible and powerful eBusiness strategy is essential. It will enable you to make your existing business processes more efficient and effective. In addition, by opening up more business channels, it will empower you to access more customers, to reach into their world to provide customized products/services at the exact moment when they need them, and to form closer relationships with them.

Those organisations that harness eBusiness early will dominate the future by squeezing out their competition. They will secure market 'real-estate' through the development of strong relationships, both with consumers and business partners. Finally, they will position themselves to prosper in fast moving markets and be able to continuously restructure themselves for change. Late arriving competitors will find this barrier too high to overcome and will either become marginalised or disappear.