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Chapter 5 E-business strategy 261

Although these quotes date back to an early phase in e-business strategy develop-
ment in organizations, they are still instructive in indicating the importance of senior
management sponsorship and ownership of e-business strategy. E-consultancy (2005,
2008a) research into managing digital channels again showed the challenges and
importance of senior sponsorship. The main challenges identified by e-commerce
managers from over a hundred participating companies from Europe and the United
States showed that gaining buy-in into e-commerce involved significant challenges for
many. These are the ratings for the main challenges:
Gaining senior management buy-in or resource (68% agreed that this was a chal-
lenge, 68% in 2005)
Gaining buy-in / resource from traditional marketing functions / brands (68%
agreed that this was a challenge, 66% in 2005)
Gaining IT resource / technical support (68% agreed that this was a challenge,
69% 2005)
Finding suitable staff appeared to have got more challenging (75% agreeing that
this was a challenge compared to 60% in 2005).
However, enormous strides have still been made with almost three-quarters of respon-
dents agreeing with the statement: ‘digital channels are fully recognised and integrated
into our annual planning and budgeting process’.

The imperative for e-business strategy

Think about the implications if e-business strategy is not clearly defined. The following
may result:
Missed opportunities from lack of evaluation of opportunities or insufficient resourcing
of e-business initiatives. These will result in more savvy competitors gaining a competitive
advantage;
Inappropriate direction of e-business strategy (poorly defined objectives, for example,
with the wrong emphasis on buy-side, sell-side or internal process support);
Limited integration of e-business at a technical level resulting in silos (separate organiz-
ational team with distinct responsibilities which does not work in an integrated manner
with other teams) of information in different systems;

Resource wastage through duplication of e-business development in different functions
and limited sharing of best practice. For instance, each business unit or region may
develop a separate web site with different suppliers without achieving economies of scale.

To help avoid these typical problems of implementing e-business in traditional organiz-
ations, organizations will want e-business strategy to be based on corporate objectives such
as which markets to target and targets for revenue generation from electronic channels. As
Rowley (2002) has pointed out, it is logical that e-business strategy should support cor-
porate strategy objectives and it should also support functional marketing and supply chain
management strategies.
However, these corporate objectives should be based on new opportunities and threats
related to electronic network adoption, which are identified from environment analysis and
objectives defined in an e-business strategy. So it can be said that e-business strategy should
not only support corporate strategy, but should also influence it. Figure 5.2 explains how
e-business strategy should relate to corporate and functional strategies. It also shows where
these topics are covered in this book.