In boardrooms across the country, e-business has become the number one business initiative. CEOs are accelerating their e-business implementation strategies in the fear that if they don't, they will be out of business or out of a job. In college, I had a professor who was fond of saying that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Organizations are in danger of doing just that with their approach to e-business.
Today, it is not enough to satisfy a customer's demands. Companies must continually innovate, provide new products and services, enter new markets, and decrease business cycle times for implementing new initiatives. In short, what a successful e-business requires is business agility. Myriad desktop configurations, network protocols and operating systems, as well as the need to integrate information with existing systems, multiple databases and data structures slowed enterprise deployments to a crawl. The problem was that each system required extensive infrastructure development.