Making business sense of electronic commerce

Although its infrastructure is still very young, e-commerce continues to create new business models and innovative marketing and technology strategies. To avoid unraveling their core processes, organizations considering e-commerce applications must take time out to evaluate the many facets of adoption and integration. Arguments for not investing in e-commerce are rapidly dissolving. It is now widely accepted that a business cannot ignore e-commerce investment without incurring heavy penalties over the long run. We believe organizations that want to invest in e-commerce must have a significantly higher degree of technological fluency and a bolder approach to experimentation with unfamiliar business models than they would for investments in other areas. Successfully exploiting e-commerce requires creatively linking an organization's strategy and its supporting technology as well as managing pervasive IT applications that change very quickly and are becoming increasingly integrated and convergent. Only then can enterprises achieve the flexible and adaptive behavior that is central to effective e-commerce.