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.

When presented a silver lining, some people just aren’t happy until they can point to a nasty dark cloud.

In the case of the year 2000 bug, I wish they’d keep their fat mouths shut.

By every rational measure, the world should look at how it handled the year 2000 problem and congratulate itself for a job well done. If we managed to apply the same practicality, tenacity, and hard work to global warming and ozone depletion, we’d fix the world’s atmosphere in a few years as well and be ready to take on overpopulation.

Instead, dunderheads looking for thunderheads are second-guessing us to death.

Case in point: A recent article by Denis Horgan who, writing for the Hartford Courant, “explains” that the year 2000 problem came about because “the computer people didn’t to their job right in the first place.”

Horgan exemplifies the kind of lout who, unencumbered by knowledge, mistakes blame for accountability. Entirely ignorant of the origins of the problem, he eschews actual research. Instead he relies on name-calling, the first resort of the intellectually lazy, blaming “…the computer world and its claque who were making so much money to fix what they had produced so very badly in the first place.”

The year 2000 problem arose from good design, not bad. The programmers who created the legacy systems that absorbed the bulk of year 2000 remediation spending were faced with permanent storage so costly that depending on when the system went into production and the exact technology used, they saved their employers between $1 and $20 for each and every record with a date field. The money saved dwarfs that spent on remediation.

Of course, anyone who blames a programmer of 1999 for the work of an entirely different programmer working in 1969 can’t be expected to understand a subject like information technology, which requires rigorous logic. Perhaps that’s why Horgan isn’t a programmer.

Horgan isn’t the only storm-cloud-finder among us, of course. So many of the weather-challenged have ridiculed year 2000 doomsayers in print that singling out one for special scorn just wouldn’t be fair. They remind me of someone diagnosed with severe cancer who recovers through the miracles of modern medicine and a lot of just plain luck, only to sneer at his doctors for overstating the severity of his condition.

The reality is that some of the worst doomsayers did overstate the problem, and we should all be grateful. If they hadn’t, too few business executives would have opened their checkbooks enough to fix the problem, and we would have faced real problems instead of only a few minor glitches. As mentioned earlier in this space, the year 2000 bug was a self-preventing prophesy, and we should thank everyone who sounded the clarion call rather than excoriating them.

Even worse than these first two categories of meteorological ninnies, though, are the inevitable complainers who acknowledge that the work was necessary and successful, but wonder if it couldn’t have been done at a lower cost.

Let’s see: IS’s overall project success rate is about 30 percent. The year 2000 remediation success rate was in the high 90s. Conclusion: We overspent on year 2000. Brilliant.

There were lots of reasons year 2000 projects got done on time, not the least of which was that the deadline was an astronomical event rather than an arbitrarily chosen date. Could it be, though, that maybe … just maybe … another important factor was that year 2000 spending rates were right, and that one problem IS has with the rest of its projects is too-tight budgets?

Year 2000 remediation was a success. A big one. When you succeed at something, what you should do is figure out what you did right and apply it elsewhere. The growing orgy of Y2K second-guessing and nitpicking is just plain idiotic.

Awhile back I suggested we organize National Boycott Stupidity Day, attended by invitation only, to counter the growing tendency Americans have to celebrate dumbness as a virtue. The next time you hear someone gripe about either the origins or resolution of the year 2000 problem, send them a copy of this article and let them know, from me … they won’t be invited.