| Ecommerce's Monthly Talking Point - February 2000 No-No-Brainers For this column, I'm going to reverse a couple of clichés. Try using these defences against two of the most common received thoughts about an organisation's transition to ecommerce. First, it's time to consider that business-to-consumer ecommerce is rocket science. If there's one thing a consumer ecommerce website has to do, it's get off the ground. It needs to be visible in a crowded sky, and every pound in weight it's carrying aloft will cost its backers many thousands of pounds (or dollars or euros) in fuel. You'll have noticed that websites need people to run them too: they're doing customer service, content management, service definition. Failing to allow for the gravity of people is one way of ensuring an early re-entry and fiery breakup. A consumer website also needs a trajectory, and a means of recalculating that trajectory when environmental factors change. So many b2c ventures are so fixated on launch that they neglect to consider where they're pointing. For our second cliché reversal, let's decide that business-to-business ecommerce is brain surgery. When an organisation sets out to collaborate electronically with suppliers and business partners, it begins to merge its thought processes with them. Today's b2b concepts largely rely on humans processing pages of text, but tomorrow's will see systems conversing with each other in order to achieve common goals. Databases will dance with each other as stock items, prices, delivery dates, contract clauses and other business objects report to collaborating systems. Objects dreamed up in one company's brain will be executed in another's, with no human intervention. To build these collaborating business systems, we'll need to understand how to interface to our business systems and exploit their native capabilities; and how to perform creative surgery amongst sets of alien systems. |