M E - COMMERCE Better Processes = Better E - Commerce

I MARCH 2005 I 57 any companies have found out the hard way that successful e-commerce requires more than a flashy Web presence. Electronic customer and supplier interaction must be seamlessly integrated with existing business processes. Quality professionals will find they must redesign business processes with this aim, particularly in the service industry. There is a historic parallel for the current uphill battle of e-commerce. The first wide-scale introductions of IT in the business place focused on the improvement of isolated parts of operations, such as generating invoices. Productivity increased locally, but the overall effect was small. Only during the ‘80s and ‘90s did companies start to see the benefits of considering entire business processes when implementing information systems, and this is when they began to achieve huge gains.