By Sanjeeva S. Dubey

Business and e-Commerce, terms which are used interchangeably, are here to stay, never mind concerns over bandwidth and the security of transactions. In the Indian context, slow decision-making on policy matters is yet another speed-breaker. Nevertheless, the real concerns are behavioral. And, broadly, they can be summarised into the 3 Cs (representing challenges), and the 3 Is (representing initiatives).

The primary challenges before companies, arising out of worldwide connectivity, is that, now that entry-barriers to markets have been rendered irrelevant by the Net, there is the omnipresent danger of the customer being poached by an unknown competitor with a better idea. This has happened in the entertainment business, and there is every chance of it happening in every business. The 3 Cs representing challenges are: the freedom of choice , the changing facet of competition, and the creativity continuum, or the ability to continually come up with an innovative solution.

The Net provides tremendous opportunity to create a virtual market to display and sell wares as well as buy them. The customer gets the freedom of choice to shop anywhere. This is the challenge of choice. With increasing freedom of choice, the customer is no longer confined to 1 shop and, unless constantly lured through a new set of value propositions, he can shop anywhere. This is the challenge of change in the competitive landscape. Only those companies which have thought out a well-articulated follow-through strategy will make it big. Chances are that if this is not properly articulated and meticulously followed, the customer will end up going elsewhere. This leads us to the challenge of maintaining a continuum of constant creativity.

This is, perhaps, the biggest challenge for Indian business, notorious for its low investment in R&D, and a focus on the short-term, quick-returns approach. Since new ways of reaching the customer will be established, businesses will grow from the fun segment, focused on teenaged customers, to serious ones in no time. Serious businesses will have to offer the best. They have to operate at minimal overheads and cannot stipulate a minimum buying limit. Unless they are able to innovate by keeping costs down and developing new products, someone else will, and they will be doomed. To tackle these challenges, companies will have to focus on what can be categorised as the 3 Is of e-Business.

The first is Investment. Invest in people, ideas, mindset change, and research. e-Business goes way beyond Web-page publishing. As we have understood rather painfully, the computer is not a glorified typewriter. Of course, it is a matter of strategic choice and debate internally. Unfortunately, this will need investment of time, ideas, and people. It will also need a new mindset: companies will have to compete through their ideas-not by blocking someone else's. The second thing companies need to acquire is the ability and desire to integrate-within themselves, with suppliers, and with collaborators, partners, and customers. Technologies like ERP provide this facility, but they are mostly being used to camouflage disjointed working in an ERP environment.

The fulcrum of any successful e-Business initiative will, no doubt, be innovation. How it is nurtured, brought out, sustained, and delivered will influence the success or failure of a company. As it is, most Net companies have shown negative operational returns. Perhaps the time for one-time big ideas is running out.

Given these challenges as well as initiatives, e-Business will need a concerted programme supported by suitable projects to enable the organisation to realise benefits. The problem is to articulate these initiatives into action programmes. Most organisations are not ready nor do they have the experience of initiating an all-pervasive, all-participative, rejuvenation programme in e-Business operations management.

Initiating an e-Business initiative is a tough task, but sustaining the momentum is even tougher. Finding a new value-proposition will need an assessment of the latent as well as perceived needs of customers. This will call for a high degree of detailed research and understanding. The senior management of a company alone cannot generate these ideas. Unless a new e-Business-orientation is ingrained in stakeholders' mind, the idea itself will never take off. This is one of the reasons for the low marketshare that e-Business activities have, and for the fact that there are few successful models to emulate.

The difficult part is to implement a sound idea by choosing a suitable e-Business design to support it. Any business design is made for meeting a specific set of requirements using a given set of capabilities. Design is preceded by strategic choice and short-lived alternatives. So, the e-Business model will have to be dynamic. One analogy could be the continuously-changing formations in a stadia where thousands of children present different combinations in a disciplined manner. These combinations are formed, broken, and re-formed to the beat of music. Here, the customer will call the tune.

If we stick to this kaleidoscopic example, we would find that none of the patterns can be formed if any of these capabilities are absent. Planning and conceptualisation also cannot be ignored, and practice is important. The bottomline: organisations have to continuously build capabilities, explore new patterns, form them, disband them-and start afresh. Only by doing so can they succeed.

Never before has the importance of individual contribution been as prominent as it is in e-Business. While one bright idea can help a company phenomenally, a small short-circuit has the capability to bring down the entire system. Keeping the team charged, empowered, and refreshed with new ideas will be difficult to achieve. Every e-Business leader has to be an hr expert. Alternatively, every hr expert has to be able to think in terms of the business. Experience will neither be an advantage nor a liability; the same is true of age and educational qualifications.

Lastly, the challenge of binding all these initiatives into a common feeling will remain the toughest of all. Unless ideas pour in from different parts of the organisation, action is taken in unison, and strategies orchestrated by teams, the competition will win. The good news is that most companies possess the capability. The bad news is that they lack the ability to mobilise teams to work together. If e-Business is to mesmerise the customer and be effective in the long term, the entire organisation, no less, has to be energised.

Sanjeeva S. Dubey is the country head of the IBM Consulting Group (India)

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