Great Expectations

The right Internet technology investments can make staying competitive a lot easier

DETERMINE YOUR CHOICES

The e-business models shown in Table 1 involve much more than simply having an "Internet presence" using marketing brochures. They require companies to reorganize their business processes and IT systems accordingly after deciding which Internet initiatives they should undertake over time. These decisions will be either proactive or reactive in nature depending upon whether your company is among the early adopters or responding to the challenge led by your competition. Nevertheless, your company will eventually be involved in more than one Internet initiative in order to meet today's demands from your customers, industry, and employees.

Interestingly, these initiatives share a commonality, not necessarily in their business strategy, but in their technology strategy: To determine the best choices. During implementation, business initiatives do influence the technology direction for the company as they include a number of costly components. This direction takes shape by creating reusable Internet technology infrastructure and services. Faisal Hogue also stresses this point in his book, E-Enterprise (see Resources), "For corporations that take time to architect a platform that meets their current needs and allows for expansion to meet future needs, e-enterprises will provide powerful leverage for every new e-initiative. Corporations that fail to design a robust architecture will run into problems with each and every new application they try to build."

How then can you ensure that your enterprise can build multiple Internet initiatives without duplicating incompatible packages and technologies? What technology framework or methodology can you use to move forward cohesively? In a time of dynamic markets and constant change, how can the technology supporting the business keep up by minimizing risks?

THE POWER OF STANDARDS

One of the key components for managing technology is establishing enterprise standards. "Frameworks" (such as for network protocols and software applications) are good examples of how standards manage complexities by their inherent design, which places important focus on "adoptability" and "interoperability." Adoptability is about accommodating change. On the other hand, interoperability is about easing integration. Frameworks achieve these goals by encouraging choices based on standards, which is also the concept behind Internet standards such as HTTP and HTML. Without any standards, things are certain to become unmanageable and chaotic.

All standards have a corresponding "domain" and "history." The domains are specific to their purpose of creation. They can be either technical (enabler), procedural (as in describing a process), or a combination of both (as in RosettaNet). Their histories, however, indicate how they have evolved into accepted standards. They can be de jure (developed officially by recognized bodies) or de facto (based on products with large market acceptance).

STANDARDS' BENEFITS

Technology standards help ensure that packages and application services do not become piecemeal solutions so that you can leverage them across other initiatives. Additionally, enterprises with standards can respond more quickly to changing business conditions than those without standards because creating information systems from compatible components is easier and less costly. As a result, an Internet technology framework built around standards is mandatory for managing consistency of choices and coherence among them (see Figure 1).

Because the Internet forces collaboration across multiple stakeholders, you should also judge the impact of technology solutions by their ability to integrate with other internal and external systems. As technologies mature, the ability to interoperate becomes more critical in controlling future risks and costs than the unique features of proprietary products. Today, interoperability is even more important because applications are becoming more complex and mission-critical in supporting a variety of channels and systems.

Selecting enterprise standards is a decision where, at minimum, you must consider scalability, reliability, openness, and manageability for each technology layer of the framework (see Figure 2). In the Internet space, scalability means supporting a high volume of requests faster while reliability focuses on the issue of preventing unscheduled downtime and repairs. Openness, on the other hand, is not having to rely on a proprietary strategy or a single vendor. The standards you deploy should also be easy to manage and inexpensive to service and maintain. As expected, however, you do have trade-offs. For example, highly reliable systems usually have higher costs associated with them. Subsequently, business constraints (such as budget and experience levels) also can affect choosing corporate standards.

EVALUATE AND ACT

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Your company must carefully evaluate which standards are most beneficial to it and your industry. You must also keep in mind that a strategy that involves a lengthy "wait-and-see approach" can cause your enterprise to fall dangerously behind the competition and the standards' learning curve. Monitoring the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Consortium can provide you with valuable information about the current work on standards.

In the second part of this article, I will examine other key components of a strategy for managing Internet technology along with an action plan you can use immediately.

Tulu Tanrikorur [wtmtrk@yahoo.com] is the vice president of technology at an international financial-service company where he is responsible for enterprise technology strategy and architecture design. He has 15 years of experience in designing and building systems.

RESOURCES

Fingar, Peter, Harsha Kumar, and Tarun Sharma. Enterprise E-Commerce, Meghan Kiffer Press, 2000

Hogue, Faisal. E-Enterprise: Business Models, Architecture and Components, Cambridge University Press, 2000

Porter, Michael E. "Strategy and the Internet," Harvard Business Review, March 2001

Related Articles on IntelligentEnterprise.com:

"Beneath the Waterline," May 7, 2001: www.intelligententerprise.com/010507/feat2_1.jhtml

"The Road to the Future of Web Services," May 7, 2001: www.intelligententerprise.com/010507/supplychain1_1.jhtml

"XML Will Make It Easier," April 16, 2001: www.intelligententerprise.com/010416/webhouse1_1.jhtml