Companies today need to have an e-commerce strategy.

Or is it an e-business strategy? There’s a lot of e-go in e-discussions. With the proliferation of e’s, e-ventually, we’ll all feel like we swallowed an e-metic.

E-nough!

In the past six months or so, I’ve run across an increasing number of pundits and consultants who are “experts” on e-business and e-commerce. They’ve all taken strong positions on the subject, and have no shortage of advice on how to thrive in the new, digital economy.

I don’t, even though I co-authored a book on the subject a few years ago (Selling on the ‘Net, Lewis and Lewis, National Textbook Company, 1996) so I must be an expert. Sorry, an e-xpert.

Why don’t I have a strong position on e-business and e-commerce? Two reasons: One, there are still too few success stories on the Web for anyone to have any confidence in what works right now and what doesn’t, let alone what will work in the future. If you’re looking for a seasoned, experienced e-business strategic consultant, you’re guilty of the same sin IS departments committed a few years ago when they were looking for Java programmers with more years of experience than the language had existed.

There’s a limit on how certain someone should be when logic is unsupported by anything more than anecdote. I figure, read William Gibson’s Neuromancer and you’ll have a better picture of the future of e than most of the consultants now expounding the wonders of the new electronic marketplace.

There’s a second reason I don’t have a strong position on e-business strategy: The very phrase asks the wrong question … and when you ask the wrong question, even the right answer is misleading.

Look closely at e-business and what you find are a set of new capabilities … or, in some cases, old capabilities, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) that are reaching critical mass. While this may seem like a fine semantic distinction, there is a difference between articulating an e-business strategy and articulating a business strategy that includes e-business technologies and techniques.

In other words, e-business is infrastructure, not strategy.

Isn’t this a distinction without a difference?

Nope. It’s central to how a CEO leads the company, and to how IS organizes technology in support of business strategy. Companies that have e-business “strategies” will also have CRM strategies (and eCRM strategies), data warehousing strategies, knowledge management strategies, and a host of others. Really, they’ll have an incoherent collection of tactics with no central strategy at all.

Now what impact do you think that approach to business strategy will have on technical architecture? Disorganized goals will usually lead to disorganized tactics, fragmented infrastructure, and a lot of frustration all the way around.

Does that mean business should ignore e-business? Not at all. New capabilities are the most destabilizing force in business because they create competition on unexpected fronts and change the dynamics of competition on the fronts on which companies already compete. If you like grandiose statements, e-business collapses natural boundaries of time and space. If you don’t, e-business creates new channels for communicating and exchanging transactions internally and with customers and suppliers. Either way, there’s a good chance it changes many of the assumptions on which business strategy has been built.

How should a company go about developing an “e-business strategy”?

Step 1: Make sure you understand the strategy you have now.

Step 2: Ponder how e-business capabilities create threats to and opportunities for this strategy.

Step 3: Pick no more than three of these threats and opportunities and design the changes your company will need to make to respond to them.

Step 4: Execute.

Now … you toil in the fields of IS. What’s your role in all of this? Aren’t these activities reserved for the executive suite?

Not hardly. The strategy, after all, is the easy part. When it comes to designing solutions and executing, the spotlight will be on IS.

Which means that IS had better have some pretty good methods in place to link information technology and business strategy.

But of course, that’s nothing new.