evolving the e-business - london business school.docVIP

Evolving the E-Business Professor Michael Earl Centre for the Network Economy CNE WP02/2001Evolving the E-Business Michael J Earl Introduction Even discounting for the hype of the IT industry, the rhetoric of business writers and the succession of wakeup calls from governments, few corporate leaders will doubt that e-commerce is here to stay. Even the collapse of dotcom start-ups and the volatility of Internet stocks cannot undermine this premise. Variously called e-commerce, e-businesses, the new economy, and so on, incumbent companies as much as dotcom start-ups are learning fast about the challenges of doing business in the information age. Indeed, if we stand back from the continuous and daily experiential learning of companies who have embraced the internet and associated technologies, we perhaps can perceive a series of stages of business understanding and development that most organisations go through – an evolutionary journey where not only lessons are learned in each stage, but where also each stage leaves behind critical imperative. This article suggests the typical six-stage journey that corporations are likely to experience (Fig.1). It also proposes six consequential lessons for both becoming and sustaining an e-business. The article therefore is both descriptive and prescriptive. The underpinning model is interpretative, based on observing, working with and researching corporations seeking to make the transition to e-business and on studying new start-ups whose raison d’etre is e-commerce. The six stages are “ideal types”, stylistic phrases which capture – even caricature – the experiential learning of these companies; thus they are not necessarily definitive periods of evolution from old economy to new economy corporations. However we do find most companies identify with the model. The spirit of the article is sense-making; the purpose is to help companies anticipate the challenges ahead and recognise ongoing necessary, but not necessarily suff