Plan Today for E-Business Future

There are 11 million Web sites on the planet, but most of them are rudimentary, such as marketing literature for a small business, a simple ordering system or a collection box for e-mails to the customer service department. According to IDC's eWorld 2001 survey, fewer than one in 10 Web sites has any kind of complexity to it, such as commerce and direct connection to an inventory control system. That will change within a few short years. If the first wave of Web site development was commerce, for which simply capturing transactions was an accomplishment, then the second wave has got to be supply chain automation, the big challenge in today's business-to-business commerce. The essence of the new applications will be the intelligent combination of content management, analytics and collaboration to the transaction processing function of an e-business application. The analytic and business intelligence function determines what's going on with the transactions; the content management functions alter offerings on the fly; and collaboration allows business partners in the value chain to react in real time to changing business conditions to, for example, forecast demand and schedule logistics. It may sound pie-in-the-sky, but bits and pieces of this functionality are here with us today. We're already seeing more business intelligence built into both relational databases and Web-based structured query tools, and we're seeing collaboration modules being inserted into content management applications. As the center of gravity for delivering e-business functions moves from single applications - ERP, CRM or e-commerce software packages - to the platforms that integrate them, such as an enterprise portal, the way that you specify, evaluate, deploy and maintain software will change.