The idea was to prevent friction between its traditional sales processes and the new sales channel of cyberspace. Internet technology is there to deliver what your customers want-timeliness, accuracy, lower cost. You can't let your organizational structure stand in the way. Once electronic business takes hold, enthusiasm for it can be infectious. With the Internet, nothing is sacred.
Electronic business means different things to different companies.
Still, many practices are common across those companies, whether they sell jumbo-jet parts, financial services, or apple juice. They include unconventional thinking, flatter IT and business organizations, corporate cultures that openly embrace change-and above all, an understanding that extranets and Web links are not only a new sales channel, but also a fundamental challenge to existing structures and relationships. Virtually every major IT supplier has hopped aboard the electronic-business bandwagon. IBM and HP have undertaken reorganizations in recent weeks to more sharply focus on the theme, though the changes could be more form than substance. As with any iteration of the Next Big Thing, IT executives must take vendors' electronic-business pitches with a large dose of caveat emptor.