In short, customers now demand that their experience online be consistently better than it was offline. Those heightened expectations place a heavy responsibility on IT organizations everywhere. IT managers are on the front lines of product development and service. Technology failures are product defects. There's no five-step program, but several fundamental principles apply.
Web usage continues to exceed projections.
So build architectures and applications robust enough to accommodate unexpected growth. Yes, everyone has ceilings on what he or she can spend, but impress upon management that embarrassing e-business mishaps and slowdowns are far more costly in the long run. Plan to be at it awhile. Even those businesses that build in adequate capacity for growth will have to change direction based on unanticipated traffic and usage patterns. Flexibility matters even more than raw size.